peace comes dropping slow

ONE YEAR

2012-01-28T06:58:00.000-08:00

Giving Up Governance of a Door

2012-01-27T08:52:00.000-08:00

Sarah has always been at the heart of me . . . the center of friends that come to you without sharing the blood of you.

We grew up in different homes. She says the door was governed on her home. It opened at the will of the parent, deciding who to let in and when. She says the door at my house barely had hinges, barely had a door - it opened before it was knocked. There were always people in and out with the blessing of whatever parent may or may not be home.

Sarah syas she wanted her grown up house to be like my childhood house. And strangely, at the time she told me that only a few years ago, my grown up house was more like her childhood house. When it came to the neighborhood children, Sarah invited and I deliberated.

Not so much anymore. We have children on our street. They eat at my table, they play on my porch, they wait at the french doors for Jonah and Caroline to finish math, they build huts in the woods at the end of the road, they play behind our garage, they build villages with Jonah's legos, they parade in the girl's dress up clothes, they make cookies with us, they dance in our kitchen, they leave their toys at our house. They gather in our driveway for a warm walk at the end of October in Virginia.

We have four doors on this house, and they all seem to open easily.

Grasping at Grandpa

2012-01-26T06:10:00.000-08:00

A recent conversation with Cecily ::

Cecily: What happens if Grandpa gets hit by a car?

Me: Which Grandpa?

C: Tickle Grandpa.

M: He can't. He already died.

C: But what if he gets hit after he comes alive again?

M: He can only die once. When we are resurrected we live forever.

C: But we will die.

M: Yes, because we're still mortal. We will die and then we will be resurrected and we will live forever. We'll never die again.

C: Oh, it's like Rapunzel's hair.

May I comment on this exchange with some degree of earnestness?

I believe what I told Cecily. My God, My Eternal Father in the Heavens above is real. He gave me my own Father here in this life - the divine gift of family, because family has always been the very illuminated center of the vastly encompassing and simple plan of all our existence. The man who is my earthly father is also a child to our spiritual Father. My Dad and I - we are father and daughter - we are brother and sister. Both recipients of the resurrection that Jesus Christ purchased for us. The ALL us. The every-human-being-who-has-ever-lived us.

In my life this is not a fantastical, wish-it-were-true fairy tale. This is the truth by which I make every choice.

God speaks to his children. Of whom, I am one who is listening. Sometimes.

Cecily is fixated with the death of her Tickle Grandpa. She is three, so her mind harbors the experience in a way I am still trying to understand. The entirety of her conscious life has been dominated by . . . change? . . . upheaval? I'm not sure what to call her experience. At two she was trying to grasp the new, abstract absence of her beloved Tickle Grandpa. Shortly thereafter she was pulled from her bed and her home to escape a flood that defined our exit from Salt Lake City itself. From January 28th of 2011 to present she has been without a stability of spirit.

In the midst of all this the constant has been her fixation with Grandpa. It manifests itself in strange places. Cecily's sadness, anger, and delight can all find a voice in Tickle Grandpa.

She watches me open a pomegranate and slowly extract the arils into a bowl for all of the children to eat unhindered by the leathery skin and difficult pith. In the motions of it I see my Dad's hands that have countless times done this same thing. He was born to the desert, eating pomegranates from beginning to end.
Cecily interrupts my thoughts with her own. "When he comes back alive, I think Tickle Grandpa will like to have pomegranate seeds for a snack."
"I'm sure he will, Cecily. Tickle Grandpa loves pomegranates."
Let's just hope that he is not gobbling them up in the afterlife making himself prisoner to the dark one like poor Persephone.

____

Cecily comes to me in the morning, still rubbing sleep from her eyes, holding a little Boppy. "Mom, I feel like I'm dreaming out of my Grandpa."

____

Cecily prays incessantly. She is in a stage of defying everyone else in the house the opportunity to pray because she owns it. And in every prayer is the same request, "Please bless my Tickle Grandpa to come back alive."

____

She requests stories over and over that feature baby Cecily and Tickle Grandpa. Her favorite is simply this:
Baby Cecily and Tickle Grandpa were sooo tired. Grandpa laid down on the couch, put Cecily right on his chest and they both fell asleep.

____

I find Cecily at the computer looking at the screen of all our Skype Contacts. She looks at me with terrible disappointment and says "I skyped Tickle Grandpa, but he wasn't alive."

____

In the midst of a tearful, screaming argument with Caroline, Cecily shouts, "STOP CAROLINE! You're making my Grandpa not come back alive!"

It is this declaration that has given me the most insight into her experience. She interprets all hurt through the lens of Grandpa being dead. The more she hurts, for whatever reason, the farther away is the reality or memory of Grandpa. And where there is peace there is also the greater possibility of his return.

I had a dream the other night in which my Dad visited me. When my eyes met his I refused to look away, knowing that I was dreaming, knowing that he was really with me, knowing that in the moment I looked away he would be gone. I miss him. I didn't want him to go. I touched his arm and we both began to float slowly away, into the sky. All the while I would not let go of his eyes. He smiled and touched my hand that was on his arm, "It's ok Jess. You can stay here. It's ok. I'm ok."

So if any of you have been wondering - he says he's ok.

When The Cat's Away . . .

2012-01-25T05:48:00.000-08:00

WHAT ?

We knew he was gifted . . . just not x-men gifted.

Hoping we don't have a Jack-Jack on our hands.

Cecily's Sword

2012-01-24T14:29:00.000-08:00

Who said it was 2?
Terrible Two has never been To-The-Pain for me. It has always been 3.
Right smack dab in the middle of Cecily's current psyche.

She speaketh like the piercings of a sword with disturbing alacrity. All smiles, or pursed lips that seem to be holding at bay her desire to laugh in the face of all my motherly frustration. Frustration might be a gentle word for it . . . perhaps motherly rage is more accurate.

With that piercing sword she strikes ruthlessly To-The-Pain, but never, sparingly, To-The-Death.
I'll explain, and in true Westley-an (Princess Bride) fashion "I'll use small words so you'll be sure to understand," but I'll stop short of calling you a warthog-faced-bafoon. A friendly gesture. I'm not three anymore. Not like some people I know.

"You're a mean mama." She takes a foot.

"I don't like your face." A hand.

"You have a big, chubby tummy, Mommy." Both eyes and a nose.

"Go away from me." But not the ears.

The ears I get to keep so I can hear, with perfect clarity, every innocent slur Cecily and the next three-year-old has to wound me with. Leaving me to "wallow in freakish misery forever."

Or not quite forever. There are glimpses of light. Because three eventually turns into four, turns into five . . .and occasionally even Cecily tests the waters of sweetness in which she used to swim freely.

Cecily making her way down our hallway that is so long we can run a hundred yard dash from one end to the other. She is wearing my leather dress boots. The boots come to my knee. The boots come to her hips, only because her body won't let them go any higher. Her hundred yard dash form my room to the kitchen is an awkward, lurching affair that she seems pleased with.

Cecily opens the refrigerator and while browsing for something good to eat she looks at me and gesturing towards the boots says "Look Mom, I'm made of you."

Yes. By the luck of the draw.
And even, sometimes, by choice.

Electronic Toys By Any Other Name . . .

2012-01-06T06:45:00.000-08:00

. . . still feel like sandpaper on my principled sensibilities.

I got out of bed at 12 minutes past 6:00 this morning - only twelve minutes later than yesterday. And it wasn't that long ago as it is now only 7:28 am. Strangely, four out of four children are still in bed. Sleeping with heaps of blankets over their little warm bodies keeping out the ridiculous cold of an upstairs that is not connected to our furnace/cooler system.

I have spoken too soon - I hear footsteps - one minute while I hug the body that goes with them . . .

Jonah. Mmmmm. Jonah.

Matt and I taught our first Institute class together last night. As he described it to the students, it is a leap of faith for us. He teaches the gospel for a living, I teach our children how to identify and label a right angle. Different spheres. But it was great fun being with Matt and sharing in the experience of teaching "Preparing for Eternal Marriage" in a class with more than 30 young adults, including five or six couples who are engaged to be married.

We are only able to do this because our dear little friend Chelsea - an SVU freshman from Alaska - is willing to come watch our children every Thursday evening for the next fifteen weeks. She loves our kids and we love her. She brought them Christmas gifts last night that she had purchased in Alaska while home during the Christmas break. Venturing out into the - 40 deg F just to git gifties for my babies. That's NEGATIVE 40 degrees. Inhospitable is a raging understatement. It's a wonder there is life on a planet that can reach such temperatures, and a wonder indeed that humans choose to live where the sun is a fleeting guest.

Anyway, Chelsea put on her parka and trudged through the frozen, dark tundra to get something to bring back for each of our children. Cecily ended up with the electronic Toddler Text and Letter Learning toy. Marketed as educational my suspicion is that the cellular phone companies produce these as means of establishing a guaranteed customer base very early.

Everything in me wanted to make the thing disappear before it really had time to appear. Cecily turned into a brute charging up the stairs with her new chiming fandangly thing as she clutched it to her bosom while she yelled at me, "No, it's mine. It's my OWN ipod. I'm putting it in my toy box and you can't touch it."

How is it that batteries make instant monsters of sweet children?

So I waited until she was asleep, stole into the cold room, pulled her plastic toy bin out from under her bed and found, way at the back, accompanied by not one other toy, the new electronic fandangly thing. With a mother's "righteous" insolence I pulled it out and hid it in a shoebox deep in my closet.

There.

But not.

It didn't feel right.

When I got out of bed this morning at twelve minutes past 6:00 it was because I knew I had to put the electronic fandangly thing back in her toy bin before she woke up. Somehow this one respect for the fledgling autonomy of my three-year-old was critical to our long term relationship.

I was right. She showed up shortly after Jonah with the toy in hand, already chiming. She and I have spent the last thirty minutes on the couch playing with it together. The toy is put away now - under a peaceable governance - so we can do other things with the day.

I am sure I preserved something between her and me that would have been lost if I had acted as brazenly as I nearly did.

What a blind business is parenting.

First Words

2011-11-23T10:39:00.001-08:00

He's a kid with problems.

Ewan didn't come out that way. He was the 8 pound 10 ounce picture of health and vigor. The kid suckled with exuberance and put on exactly three pounds and six ounces before his body quit figuring out what to do with mother's milk. For five months his insides failed to pull from my milk whatever it needed to add to his flesh.

Nothing.

Skinny.

Lethargic.

Crying.

And then 10 ounces disappeared. Poof. The boy was beginning to vanish and the doctors began to materialize in concerned haste.

They say when a baby is starving - without using the word starving - that the brain quits doing anything but surviving. So, while his sweet cousin, baby Ava was figuring out how to sit up, Ewan was laying quietly on his back working with all his might just to 'be.' When cousin Davy was learning to respond to his parents singing "Popcorn Popping", Ewan was burning whatever calories there were to keep his insides functioning. When his new little friend Penny was crawling throughout our house begging to climb up our stairs Ewan was lying on his stomach pulling with all his might to scoot himself forward just a few inches.

The kid is late to the party.

But it's ok. He's had some "developmental delays" in gross and fine motor skills as well as speech. He is now receiving free, in-home therapy for both. And while one might think, how could a 14-month-old possibly need speech therapy, I have been amazed what kinds of things I can do to help develop communication.

Despite all this, Ewan loves life. He is happy. There is nothing he likes more than going outside to feel the earth around him.

Which is where his first words came from.
We developed a routine that went like this:
cry,
hold,
console,
go outside (day or night),
point at everything and say "Oh Wow."

Oh Wow.

This is the first thing he has to say about the world he lives in. His first words.

Bird - oh wow! Wind in the leaves - oh wow! Baby kitten on our porch - oh wow! Squirrels scrambling up the tree - oh wow! Lights that turn on and off - oh wow!

He's right. There is a whole lot of 'Oh Wow' everywhere I look. I see it so often that it loses its wow-ness in my lack of perspective.

Oh to live life in awe.

There is elegance in my chaos. I can stretch my pointer finger out like Ewan does and touch beauty. Oh Wow. Not just in the goodness of my life and family. It is in everything. I don't know anything about String Theory Physics, but I think it merits my respect. The recipe of a Virginia forest. The art of collecting a string of characters together on a page until your eyes see them as the words your mouth speaks. To read. To speak. To put your fingertips on the keys of a piano and dance. To extract from a swab of my cheek the deoxyribonucleic code that is the essence of me. Oh Wow.

Some people do great things because they know how to touch the oh-wow-ness of life.

I read recently that while Steve Jobs was battling through the very end of this life his last words were "Oh wow." A requiem true to the zeitgeist of his Jobs-onian existence. No demi-god, but a man who sought elegance, and lived in the realization of ideas.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. From womb to grave it is 'oh wow.'

Someone Who Needs Somewhere

2011-11-17T10:10:00.001-08:00

". . . . a song for
someone who needs somewhere
to long for . . . ."

If there were ever a light cast across a piece of earth more beautiful than the one on this particular June evening in a little corner of New York state, I have never seen it.

This light came with restoration to our weary souls.
Did we leave our friends without proper goodbyes?
Did we drop tears onto the skinny face of a sick baby?
Did we feel homeless before we ever left home?
Did we drive 2000 miles?

We could answer "yes" honestly, but the whole truth of it would be lost somewhere in the bleakness of the question.

We have friends, we have a baby, we have a home, we are together!
Yes, these patch up the spaces that felt empty in the question.

As lake Ontario laps soothingly at our feet and the sun throws warm, low light across our faces we begin to be happy.

We trust,

In all of it, I see two things.

I see where my Dad is not. He is not sitting on the bench next to my Mom, with a book in his hand, or a laptop on his lap, or his hand resting softly at the nape of her neck.

I see children who build. I think Jonah told me they were elves making a shelter because he became ill. Nowhere to live? Nowhere to rest when your body is spent? They pull from the unmade space as we do in time of need. Here a stone, there a stick, a piece of driftwood drug from the water. All buttressed against a small rise of earth. The whole thing a bulwark of youthful ingenuity that protects against element and distress.

It is the blueprint to the weeks ahead.

Fallingwater

2011-10-24T15:54:00.000-07:00

You are a place of old age, a place of cracking cement and rusted metal, old glass and old ideas. You are a place to find metal cups in metal cabinets, orange polyester party goers, and coral lipstick.

You are Fallingwater.

Which means, really, you are a place fresh and vibrant, ahead of your time. You are straight out of the 1950's before there were 50's. Born in 1936, when the world was still building boxes, Mr. Wright was building beauty, and you are IT.

This was an unplanned pilgrimage. Matt and I were in Pennsylvania for a CES Couples Conference staying at a Mennonite camp retreat that turned out to be just 30 minutes from Fallingwater. I insisted. Matt obliged.

We pulled into the car park and stopped for just a moment before getting out of the silver Chevrolet rental.

"I don't know that you understand just how big a deal this is for me." I said to Matt.

"How come," he asked?

"It's like doing something vicariously for my Dad that he never got to do for himself."

Matt obliged and then he engaged our tour guide so intensely that she asked him if he was an architect. Matt is the master of questions . . . and observation. Despite pressing our guide to the very fringes of her allotted minutes in each room she still failed to mention to us that we could be part of the "in-depth tour group" starting shortly after ours. Matt's interest was heightened such that they should have offered and "in-depth-after-hours tour" just for the two of us.

My Dad made wood do the bidding of his hands for a living until his hands betrayed him and then he taught high school kids how to do those things. It wasn't the "perfection of the life" he might have hoped for, but it provided for his family. In my early years - many of them - like the years from birth to about eight years old, my Dad was a student of the Industrial arts as well as anything else that caught his fancy. Which was everything. Which made graduation a thing always on the distant horizon.

Somewhere in those years my Dad studied architecture. If you study architecture you are introduced to a fellow called Frank Lloyd Wright. Mr. Wright is more than an architect, but I do not know his words or work well enough to render any interpretation of what he is.

I will let him speak for himself:

A philosophy is deduced from nature, and if according as the philosophy is parallel to the truths and processes of nature, it endures. Without philosophy there is no understanding of anything. Man is a phase of nature. And only as he is related to nature does he matter, is he of any account whatever above the dust.

He is well known for works such as Fallingwater, The Robie House, Taliesen West, and most notably, The Guggenheim Museum in New York City. I knew these words as a very young girl. My young mind was the keeper of images so unique they could vary in a hundred ways and every one of them be a Frank Lloyd Wright signature, as recognizable as a Coca Cola logo. The lines and circles of his leaded, stained-glass windows.

You have seen them.

They might bring to mind words like "art deco" or "arts and crafts". While not a student of architecture myself I am pretty sure Wright can be found somewhere in the midst of those words, or perhaps those words can be found somewhere in the midst of Mr. Wright. At any rate, there is some correlation.

I tried to walk through Fallingwater with my father's eyes. I tried to invite him into my fingertips to say "I have touched it. This cantilevered thing of genius." I tried to give his ears the sound of falling water that can be heard from every part of the house as a river flows beneath it and down through Pennsylvania woods. I took one leaf from one rhododendron that fills the forest, to put in my journal and write - Here is a living thing from a living memory that my father gave to me.

You are Fallingwater.

I know your name from my Father's tongue and your beauty from my own eyes.

Keeping Vigil

2011-09-11T05:51:00.000-07:00

You have a memory.

You were in a place.

Getting ready for work, eating breakfast, driving. You were watching the Today Show, listening to NPR, sitting in class. You were in an airport, on a plane. You were in the office, you were sending your kids to school.

And then, in the quotidian momentum of a day where the sun was pushing you forward into the familiar steps of a Tuesday morning, you stood still.

Something was happening that began to wrap its cold grip around your lungs until you felt the absence of your breath and the absence of your hallowed American security. Something had made a hole in our impregnable United States.

You own your memory of that moment. There are many millions of them; that moment when we learned of the planes that were plowing through the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, into the soil of Pennsylvania. A surreal pause in the spinning of things.

This morning, on the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 I am listening to the memorial service at Ground Zero in New York City. For the past two hours they have read the names of those who died that morning. Each giver of the names is a loved one of the deceased. They read several names then offer a message to their own beloved who was lost.

They are young, those reading the names. Some of them too young.

No, that little boy could not have been alive on that day. He cannot possibly own one of those where-you-were-what-you-were-doing memories that the rest of us have. And indeed he was not.

"Sebastian Gorky," this little boy says into the microphone. "Who I never met because I was in my Mom's belly. I love you, Dad."

So many fatherless.

"Winston Arthur Grant - My father; a good, kind, godly man."

"Geoffrey Hike Hardy - Dad, I'm still learning to cook. I'm working on it. We miss you."

"Joseph Gridlack - His physical presence and bushy mustache are missed. Semper Fi. I hope you dance."

"James Patrick Ladley - Dad, your guiding hand on my shoulder will stay with me forever."

_____

I remember a blue and empty sky

For so many days

My empty sky

This was our fear - our almost . . .

Such determination to deny that we are changed

But who can look into this empty sky and think

We are not afraid of you

Our lips so close to calling the bluff

Something has changed

Something . . .

______

The Jewish have a tradition whereby they do not leave the body of a dead person to be alone from the time the spirit departs to the time the body is buried in the earth.

September 11th left so many bodies - not even bodies - remnants. Unidentifiable.

The young Jewish women of local Stern College kept vigil with those remnants for seven months while DNA testing was done to identify remains for internment. They were girls, students, who set up rotations such that no possibly Jewish body was left unattended, day or night, for seven months.

All of it; the terror, the death the heroism, the colossal waste, the fear, the empty skies, tells me to keep vigil with the people God grants me as loved ones in this fragile mortality. Day and night, for years on end, I stay close to the living bodies of those that breathe in my house.

What do you remember? What have you learned?

And consider participating in this project.

9/11 Memorial

Even Sick Babies Are Perfect

2011-09-07T18:12:00.000-07:00

Not even a year old and our little Ewan is facing the pharmaceutical regimen of an octogenarian.

My Friend Jackie and I both have four children. The last two (mine and hers) were born three days apart from each other. She and I have many times sat in the unladylike manner of two women very large with child and spoken of the charmed and bless-ed nature of our lives thus far. Though neither of us inclined to pessimism, we mutually admitted a growing sense of dread that with each child we add to our family there is a greater likelihood for tragedy - or hardship - illness- death - disease - something that doesn't feel quite so easy as a healthy newborn.

And newborns are SO easy.

Her fourth was born early and spent a fair bit of time in the NICU while she went back and forth from home to hospital trying to mother all of them in her postpartum delirium. Except Jackie doesn't actually suffer from delirium, or anything like unto weakness. She's kind of like the female Chuck Norris - you know, her tears cure cancer. It's just too bad she never cries.

I wanted to help her family while she was jockeying this trial, but as luck would have it my own very pregnant body was in the throws of a painful and protracted prodromal labor. And I am no Chuck Norris so I mostly kept to my bed.

Plus it was Jackie's fault because she fed us barbecued garlic chicken which produced nearly identical results just over two years before. Wives and husbands talked and laughed and ate more garlic than is healthy for intimacy of any kind. Kids played in the sandbox - then badda bing - Jackie's got a baby by morning and my Cecily comes three days later. 26 months later we do the whole routine over again - barbecued garlic chicken, badda bing, Jackie's baby by morning and my Ewan three days later.

Ewan came healthy. Ewan came big - 8 pounds, 10 ounces. He ate fine, he smiled, he slept, he grew, then he stopped growing. For five months Ewan not only gained no weight, but lost 10 ounces. He was diagnosed Failure to Thrive, which in medical mumbo jumbo is really just code for "this child has . . . ?????"

After many tests, including a full endoscopy at Primary Children's Hospital where I saw his pretty, pink insides we got more than a question mark.

"Eosinophilic esophagitis" said the very kind and hurried pediatric gastroenterologist on the phone just a week before we left Salt Lake City for a new home on the east coast. "Pick up this prescription, give it to him once a day, and good luck out there."

I gave it to him. He woke up. Ewan had a latent personality that emerged when suddenly his pain was suppressed and he could EAT. He gained five pounds in two months - which still leaves him soundly off-the-chart-small, but it is better than wasting away to nothing.

We finished Ewan's meds two weeks ago and I was feeling a bit liberated until we saw a new pediatric gastroenterologist last week. He sent me home with a new phrase - "chronic disease", and a slew of new meds that I have been afraid to start because they are so many and so specific in their requirements that I need a detailed chart of when and how much and before or after food and gargling with water to prevent thrush after this one.

Cause every one-year-old can gargle.

I'm pretty hopeless with a medically pedestrian round of antibiotics. Administering medication of any kind with consistency is for sick people - not me. But my son is sick, all 17 pounds of him, all 12 months of him, all the cherubic yumminess of him is chronically sick. I am the only person on this earth that will make sure that his mouth is rinsed out after taking budesonide to avoid an oral yeast infection. I have to do it.

So there it is - my diminishing returns on the ability to produce procreative perfection indefinitely. It is my "tragedy" which, for reasons unknown, seems more frightening at night when every one else has gone to sleep and I am left to eat massive helpings of worry all by myself.

My Mom pointed out to me today how lucky we are it is not something worse.

"It could be so much worse" she said.

"It could be," I agreed.

She was right. There was my little boy smiling at me, trusting that, come bed time, I would rinse his mouth out after the budesonide.

And I did.

Just a Place To Lay My Head

2011-08-29T18:38:00.000-07:00

Some times, some of us arrive at a place of desperation. Here is a small Cecily, having arrived at that place. What it looks like to her - that desperation - is a wearisome day trailing along behind so many wearisome days with no bed to call her own.

Along came a flood and washed us all away. It swept a small Cecily right out of her crib, right out of her mother's arms who called her "my baby" and rocked her slow, and laid her down with a Boppy and a blanky giving her over to a night of sweet sleep. This flood lapped relentlessly at the bottom of our stairs and the fringes of our sanity until we turned our backs on our dear old red brick friend we now refer to as "1010," which was as true a home as we have ever known.

And so sleep becomes a borrowed thing - putting children's bodies on the floors of loved one's living rooms, and basements, and extra bedrooms. Sleep becomes a thing of thank you to those who open their doors and say "stay as long as you need, and then stay a little longer, because your kids are lovely and we have missed you, and this is what family does, and even because we need the blessings that come with being able to do this little bit for you."

We are nomadic for a spell. Having packed up the movable bits of our life into every corner of a white Toyota Sienna we go East on I-80 looking over our shoulders at the valley full of all the moments of my babies being born and all the driving back and forth to houses full of people we love, and so many warm afternoons with our toes in the cool water of City Creek, or running the brick path through our very own Narnia between Main and State just above North Temple.

We look north, straining to catch the spires of the Temple that is so off center in the sprawling valley and so dead center in the scheme of it all. From those spires it is just a bit to the west and only a few blocks north where, if you are a person who has climbed to the top of Ensign Peak, you will see the green trees lining the streets that take your eyes to the chapel at 8th North and 12th West wherein lies the heart of Rose Park. Wherein lies my heart. But only for that last fleeting moment before Parley's Canyon closes in around us and we live in Salt Lake City no more.

Oh Cheyenne, Lincoln, Chicago, Cincinnati, I admit, I am content to leave your hotels, your Steak and Shake, your Wendy's, your countless gas stations, your badlands and bad breakfasts. I can drive past your many hundreds of miles of corn stalks and not feel the pine of leaving it all behind. I am still raw from parting with Isaiah's blossoming desert. Every mile I have put between myself and the place "at the top of the mountains" makes rosier the lens through which I see it.

Oh Utah, had I the facility of a welsh tongue, I would christen you the source of my own "hiraeth" that weighs heavy in my bosom, like a tether, like an apron string pulled taught and straining inside me.

But straining as they are, these apron strings loosen well enough when finally, after five days of in and out and drive and drive we tumble out into Palmyra's green humid hills, into my sister's house, into my Mother's arms. Ah, I see, home has traveled with us without my even knowing it.

____

July 24th, no coincidental day of pioneering, brought us all the way to a little clearing along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Buena Vista is an afterthought to the places we call towns and cities. At dusk we arrive with just enough light to drive by the new, red brick house that will buttress all our efforts at familial life. It is our refuge, just as soon as we turn it inside out with enough elbow grease to render it Matthew's "bane" no longer. It needs work . . . and love . . . but mostly work with a stern voice and a hand on the hip.

April 7th was the last night I put all my babies in all their beds and felt like a fit mother for offering them stability and peace. 144 nights of musical beds followed, that mostly consisted of a blanket and a pillow on someone's floor. Tonight they lay their heads on their own pillows and sink softly into new mattresses with crisp, clean linens knowing that whether it is Virginia, New York, cursed Wyoming, or blessed Utah, home is in the bosom of their parent's love, which has a surprisingly pliant circumference.

How Soon We Are Put to the Test

2011-05-24T07:06:00.000-07:00

{ Excerpts from my journal }

17 December 2009 Thursday

Mom calls me from the hospital sobbing. "He's irascible and mean. He says I'm stubborn and unforgiving. He's yelling at me and at the nurses. He tried to walk out of the hospital but the nurse finally told him he has wires inside him all the way to his heart that the doctor must remove first, and if he leaves his insurance won't pay for anything."

Way to bully the bully, Nurse Ratched.

Somehow I know that what my Mom needs is for me to take charge and tell her what to do. She and Aubrey do this for me when I call in hysterics.

"Pull it together, Mom," I demand. "You know this is up and down. You know who Dad is and you are dealing with him under the worst circumstances of his life. Don't act like it's falling apart. You get it together and be there for him. Just let it roll off right now, and give him time to make changes."

She calms down, "Okay, okay, you're right."

They have been waiting all day to be discharged from the hospital and my Dad is desperate to see the kids before we leave for Utah.

Chani comes over and we all make a "WELCOME HOME" sign for Dad. We start a fire. Clean the house.

Eventually they get home. Dad is wonderful with the kids. He shaves his beard and mustache first thing. He looks DIFFERENT. I have never seen his hairless face. It is part of his new self he says.

Cecily and Caroline sit in his lap, as they did the night he left for the hospital. We have come full round, bringing countless stitches, weakened bodies, and stronger spirits with us. He is finally at peace, eating the best smoothie of his life and holding grandkids.

PARIS . LONDON . ROME - VEGAS . PALMYRA . HEAVEN

2011-05-21T09:09:00.000-07:00

{ Excerpts from my journal }

16 December 2009 Wednesday (continued)

He calls Aubrey while I am sitting next to him and tells her to buy the house with the apartment because he and Mom are going to drive out in May to stay for a few months, maybe serve a six month mission in Palmyra.

Aubrey calls me a few minutes later, "Are you with him?" she asks exasperatedly. "What is he talking about? Something is going on. He sounds different."

"He's glowing," I say.

She is crying. "I know. I can feel it, hear it in his voice and I'm not even there."

He wants me to shave his beard and mustache. I'm nervous - nervous that I will cut him, but more nervous to see his face without it. As though everything has changed so quickly that taking his beard will take a part of his identity. I don't want any part of my Dad to be gone, not when these past six days have planted in me the fear of all parts of him being gone.

Grah comes and I pass the responsibility of shaving to him. We mutually decide the one razor we have is not sufficient to remove all the hair. Dad settles for tomorrow.

They are talking about fishing, all the things they will do.

"Things are going to change," my Dad tells Grah - his only son. "We're going to be doing a lot of things together."

"We're putting a permanent basketball hoop up when we pave our driveway," Grah tells him. "I figure we can play some one-on-one, half court. It's time for you to teach me to play basketball."

Grah leaves - he was visiting on his lunchbreak - promising to return tomorrow.

Dad tells me about the cardiac ICU nurse that met him when he came into emergency. She asked if he was feeling ok. "NO," he replied. She looked at him for a split second and said "You're having a heart attack. Come with me."

When it became clear that he was going to have open-heart surgery and who the surgeon would be she said "You came in at the right time. You're getting the number one surgeon in all of Nevada."

Eventually I had to leave sending my Mom back with the voice recorder trying not to miss all that he was offering.

___

Tonight as my Mom and I sit talking, eating milk and cookies in front of the fireplace before going to bed, she is crying tears of joy. "I have never been so happy before. I think this is the happiest day of my life," she says. "Always before there have been dark corners, hidden sorrows, but today they are gone."

She told Aubrey earlier "even if it all goes back to the old Wayne - I had today. I can survive on today."

Shaking Hands With Palestine

2011-05-19T08:02:00.000-07:00

{ Excerpts from my journal }

15 December 2009 Tuesday

Today my Mom is with him. About seven hours. I did not see him, but she says he is talking a lot, and making plans.

16 December 2009 Wednesday

Twice now I have come through the Emergency Room doors as entrance to the hospital and found a grown man in desperate, hopeless tears, with someone beside him offering what comfort they can.

___

Today his bed was empty as I came around the corner. Dad was sitting in the chair having a breathing treatment.

"You're beautiful," he declares from behind his mask. "Those are nice jeans, are they new?"

"Kind of, " I answer.

"You probably wear them because Matt thinks you look hot in them."

"Matt thinks I look hot in most everything."

"Those are really nice shoes," he adds.

"Dad, I don't know that you have ever noticed my shoes before."

"Jessica, I am noticing everything today," he tells me with tears in his eyes. These are the first of many tears I will see in the next three hours.

My father is in awe over everything. He is friends with everyone. His nurse, Yvonne, has a very limited number of smiles, but she is willing to give him a few because he is too solicitous to resist.

Dr. Romeya comes in, one of the two surgeons who performed the bypass. Dad says "you have a great smile."

"Thank you," Dr. Romeya answers with a mysterious accent. "God just made me this way."

"Do you mind if I ask where you are from," Dad inquires.

"Palestine," the doctor answers.

"My niece and nephew went there and they said they loved Palestine - liked it way better than Israel. Not that they didn't like the Israelis, they just liked the Palestinians more."

Dr. Romeya is smiling again - truly a beautiful, full face smile - graciously, slightly sheepishly accepting and simultaneously deflecting my Dad's compliment.

"They are good people," the doctor says. And I wonder if he is speaking of the Israelis or the Palestinians.

There is a bit of conversation about Iranian missile testing, spread of nuclear technology. At the end we mutually agree we just need peace.

"We need to get together, like you and me, right here," my Dad says with more tears. Dr. Romeya deliberately, thoughtfully extends his hand and his smile to my Dad, who takes it in a kind of fraternal grip.

"Yes, we are here together. This is what the world must do," Dr. Romeya says as he takes his leave.

___

Friends, friends, and more friends.

At some point during his exchange with the surgeon a man comes in to collect the rubbish from my Dad's room. "Hi Jean," my Dad greets him by name, "how you doin today?"

"Good Wayne, thanks."

Dad compliments Dr. Ngueyn - nice hair, the pulmonologist - nice tie, Grah - nice shoes.

Goodwill and kindness springing from his new heart.

He says he has blessings to count and I want to record them to remind him later when the honey moon of new life has faded.

Nita is more than half the blessings of his whole life.

He says he needs to do more for her,

mend broken fences.

Mostly on his part.

Shave his beard to be ready to serve a mission.

And "Shhh, this is a secret, I'm going to learn to dance,

so I can dance with your Mother.

Probably have to be line dancing,

something I can do in cowboy boots."

I ask if he is seeing anything as a blessing that he might not have recognized as such before the heart attack and surgery.

Oh yes.
1 - The School District. I've been blaming them for my issues, my depression, but it's not their fault. I've had a job for twenty years that has provided for my family.
2 - The heart attack itself. It is closing doors and opening doors.

"Everything is changing," he says.

There is a glow around him; kind to everyone, grateful, hopeful.

"70 pounds in a year," he says

"In 52 weeks?" I ask.

"Well, maybe 18 months."

He doesn't argue with the dietician, a cute girl called Jen.

"For Jennifer?" he asks.

"Yes, Jennifer," she confirms.

So he sings Donavan's Jennifer, Juniper, and I sing with him.

Jennifer Juniper, hair of golden flax.
Jennifer Juniper longs for what she lacks.
Do you like her ? Yes, I do, Sir.
Would you love her ? Yes, I would, Sir.
Whatcha doing Jennifer, my love ?

Then he speaks to this Jennifer with an impressive Scottish brogue, "like Donavan," he says.

Would That I Were His Saving Angel

2011-05-18T06:57:00.000-07:00

But at least his cherub if nothing else.

{ Excerpts from my journal }

14 December 2009 Monday

His curtain was closed when I came in but he recognized me right away when I pulled it back just a bit. Improvement. As I walked toward him my Dad held his hand out to me and said "You are so beautiful."

"So are you," I responded , kissing his forehead.

"No I'm NOT."

Today he is mean in his thoughts:

I HATE this place. This is worse than Auschwitz. They have it down to a science. They take no time getting to know their patients. Everyone is ignoring me. Who is that person - Get out of here (to unknown person). I tell you, when we got here the other night I already hated it. I was ready to turn around and go home. I was going to tell your mother to hire Scott Mitchell to sue this place - some kind of investigation - somethin'.

Then he grabs my hand as I raise or lower the bed for him, fetch the nurse for pain meds, ask for some apple juice, and he says "You're my cherub."

Later he puts his hand on my cheek and says "Ohhh, you were the one with me at the door when I said I wasn't feeling good."

I take his hand from my cheek, grasped tightly in both of mine, "I should have called 911 Dad. I'm sorry."

He just smiles.

His smile tells me its ok, because whatever did happen, however it all worked out - it worked out. He's here, smiling.

Now he sleeps. Now I will read - catching up on my Book of Mormon challenge.

____

He just woke up. "Oh, I thought I was home," he laments.

"Tomorrow Im going to try to convince your Mom to bring my lap top. She probably won't, but I would like (dramatic pause) to try."

"I don't know if they have wireless internet here," I say.

"I don't need internet. I can write. I'm a writer."

"Oh," I say. "Well, you should start something new, something stream of consciousness."

He's drifting back to sleep.

"For posterity," I say.

He wakes up as Karen, the night nurse, comes in to check on him. "Do you know how many people are worried about me and praying for me?" he asks her.

She takes the bait, "How many?"

"Hundreds . . . hundreds of millions," he declares.

"My Dad is well known for his exaggeration gene," I tell her.

Karen looks right at him with a hand on her cocked hip, smiling just a bit and says "Oh Wayne, you've told me that a million times."

Karen plays ball in the big leagues.

Quotations For A Sunday Evening

2011-05-17T06:51:00.000-07:00

{ Excerpts from my journal }

12 Dec 2009 Saturday

I sit beside my Dad having sent my Mom home to rest. Another attempt this morning to bring him out of sedation and remove the ventilator. Unsuccessful.

13 December 2009 Sunday

(Five days of being unconscious)

By his side again - four minutes past 4pm. My Mom got here this morning just before 10:00. The doctor had removed the ventilator at 9:15. Rumor has it he has been a bear all day. His verbal greeting to the doctor and nurses after they pulled the ventilator out of his throat was a raspy, angry "What the HELL?" But my Mom says that he nodded when she asked if he could hear her.

Things have been violent and crazy, doctors in and out, multiple nurses required to keep him down. He's shouting and grunting, mostly slurs. When I got here he had slid down the bed with his right foot on the floor. Ann (the nurse) said he liked that position and they decided to let him stay that way, leaving his legs free while his arms are still tied down.

In the two hours I've been here he has begun to emerge. He is talking - somewhat slurred but mostly understandable. Once he realized I was here and who I am he said (with the most prohibitive dry-tounge lisp you can imagine) "Jeth, do me a favor, bring me a knife. I gotta cut theethe thtraps off."

"Is your leg bothering you?" I ask.

"No," he responds tersely, "but my TIE-DOWNS ARE!"

He tries a new tactic. "Nurthe, if you untie me, I abtholutely promithe I'll be good."

So she did. She told him he could be untied while I'm here.

"Are you gonna feed me ice?" He asks me.

"I don't have any more. You ate it all."

"Yes you do," he accuses, and then demands "go get some more."

In his most imploring abandoned voice he cries "Ohhh pleeease - come on. Can we go home?"

"JESS! HELP!"

"What do you need Dad?"

"COVER ME!"

This he yells in desperation as his sheet has fallen to one side exposing the nakedness he does not know has been his common exhibition over the past four unconscious days. I have tried constantly to cover him as quickly as his restless body uncovered itself, but at some point nakedness ceased to diminish his dignity. His thrashing meant he was alive and that was more joyful than exposure was embarrassing. But not for his conscious self.

"I'm SO frustrated!" he snarls through clenched jaw.

"About what Dad," I ask in a calm and therapeutic way.

He looks me straight in the eye and says "Figure it out."

Touche'.

The nurse asks him - what's your name, your last name, your birthday, how old are you, all of which he responds appropriately to. Then she asks him who the president of the United States is. Uh-oh, I think.

"Uggghhhh," he says.

"Ok, no political affiliations." Ann deflects. "Just asking who the president is."

"Ohhh - baahma," he answers with a slurry sneer.

Disagreeable Harbingers

2011-05-16T14:28:00.000-07:00

While we are in the midst of a totally life changing experience right now, and there is much to tell in that vein, I am not yet prepared to leave the words that will help me write about all the things of life that come after death.

Death is no respecter of persons - persons either living or dead. He comes and he takes and he leaves and we reel either way. Part of my reeling is writing. Part of regaining my balance is writing.

{ Excerpts from my journal }

3 December 2009 Wednesday

We are in Las Vegas. It is, of course, too late and I should have been asleep two hours ago. Matthew is left home alone, working feverishly to finish his dissertation for submission by December 31st. It is hard to imagine our life without the task master of "Dad's book." I wonder how things will change - but I can't let myself wonder too much yet.

8 December 2009 Tuesday

My father is at Sunrise Hospital in the midst of open-heart surgery. He suffered what seems to be a massive heart attack while sitting in his chair laughing and talking with us. Holding Cecily and teaching her to say "ta-da."

He tried to drive himself to Quick Care knowing something in his chest didn't feel right and my Mom was at a church meeting. He went to two locations - neither open - came home and called my Mom to come drive him to emergency. There they determined he was still having the heart attack. Right aorta 100% blocked, left aorta 80% blocked, angioplasty unsuccessful. They took him to the OR around 11:15pm to begin a three hour, open-heart, triple by-pass surgery.

This is . . . surreal. I have not cried yet. I am afraid of opening the flood of tears. Chani and Scott came to the house and are staying the night here.

OR doctor called the house during surgery to get my Mom's cell phone number. I asked if he was at liberty to give any information. He said "No, but everything is fine, he's ok."

"So, he's alive?" I asked.

"Yes."

I cannot wish this away. I cannot let myself feel the reality of it.

It is 2:20 am. I go to bed now. My Mom is not home yet. Wait to hear more in the morning.

9 December 2009 Wednesday

Matt will be here in seven hours. I want his presence desperately.

My Dad is ok. Still sedated, still un-present in his current circumstances. We can't go to him, not even my Mom. She went to the hospital and was able to look at him through a window and see him sleeping, but he can't know she is there. He's an agitated fighter - in danger of pulling out all the carefully placed tubing.

I spent the day talking and talking and talking. I took my Mom's cell phone and answered every call that came to her throughout the day. She gave me a list of everyone she wanted to know, none of which she could bear to talk to herself.

What I Wrote Before I Knew

2011-04-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

I have things to say about my Dad.

First - I miss him.

Sometimes at night, I cry into a pillow on the couch while everyone else is asleep. I do this because the kind of crying I give myself to, the crying that comes with saying "My father is dead", is not the kind of crying that is easy to do in front of other people. There is an abandon to it that makes other people so unsure of what to do. And the truth is they don't need to do anything. Except Matt, who needs to hold me occasionally while I cry the cry that would be humiliating if it weren't making the tears that fall to my Father's grave.

My journal keeps my memories for me. Once I write down the goings-on in my head, I can let go of them mentally. Thus, it is always a bit of a surprise to go back and read. The details of my life live in the pages far more than they live in my head.

There are a series of entries I will share. They are the spiritual prescience of saying goodbye, while goodbye was still still beyond the horizon.

Here is the first - written just as Jonah was getting over a severe facial tic that seemed devastating at the time:

02 Sep 2009 Wed

I have periodically wondered at the goodness of our life, and how I will react when something threatens that. I fear now that I am fragile, in a way I was not familiar with. This has been only a brush with trial - not actually trial itself - and I have nearly fallen apart. What I know is that I was recovering emotional strength before Jonah was recovering physically. I DO have something in me that can move past fear and carry on with life. I must foster that ability in preparation for whatever hits next.

03 Sep 2009 Thurs

Television is bad.

05 Sep 2009 Sat

Two hours on the strip in Las Vegas reminds me why we make so much effort, work so hard to remove ourselves from the world. Hedonistic indulgence offers me nothing - it cannot persuade me. I am a daughter of God. I am a woman of virtue pursuing something very different.

06 Sep 2009 Sun

Matthew -- tomorrow I regain thy presence. Always a sweet reunion.

What Can Be Built

2011-03-29T09:41:00.000-07:00

Wayne Allen Leavitt

November 18, 1949 - January 28, 2011

They say you stood in a hole deep enough to cover your head, frozen in the northernness of New York’s early winter. They say you worked nearly as hard as my Mother all that day laboring the labor that builds a habitat for humanity. A house; cement and wood, and walls to keep the snow out and the babies in their beds.

They say your bones hurt at the end. You returned wanting warmth and the “sussies” that keep you going. Your last pleasure. When the camera caught you your mouth was almost smiling, your right arm pulling Nita in close - her littleness fitting snugly beneath you. You were both clad for keeping cold out. White long johns and wool socks. You were standing in my sister’s house, your oldest daughter. New York was the wake of the first time your heart stopped.

Lonely is the wake of the second time your heart stopped.

My body is lying in your bed, trying to sleep through the wrongness of being here. My husband is asleep beside me, my baby in a cot at my feet. Three of my children, the three that know your name, that have squealed in delight at the mercy of Tickle Grandpa’s tickles are in beds two thousand miles away.

It is morning. February sun glistens in February snow filling your room with winter white and the blue that could be summer if it held the sun higher in the sky. Ewan is smiling while I lay him on your bed to change his diaper. He is smiling and I am thinking how pissed off you must be that here he is - the only grandchild you have not met. You were getting antsy. You were content with New York, but for your little ones in the west getting less little every day. And this littlest one was calling to you. It is the babies that have always fit perfectly up against your chest. I can’t help feeling like our being here is mocking your yearning. I wish we were here eight days ago. I wish you could pull him up to smell the babyness of him, and see the blueness of your eyes in his.

Introductions and reunions for another time.

You didn’t stay long enough to see the house built up around the foundation you laid that day in Rochester’s cold dirt. You would have carried a pencil tucked in your ear, making graphite marks on 2 x 4’s that you would cut as you have ten thousand times before. You would have dazzled them with your know-how, making them think what good fortune was theirs to have this seasoned wielder of hammers and drills and saws building a house for them. As it is, someone else will build the walls that keep those babies in their beds.

Lucky then, isn’t it, that you have already hammered enough nails and to spare to keep your legacy standing for a long time. The legacy you built keeps out rain, and wind, and snow, robbers, thieves and liars. The legacy you built keeps out Satan. It keeps me warm and right. You set the nails carefully and struck countless blows that taught me to know God and know myself.

Here is this nail - upon which the blow will resonate with curiosity, this one faith, this one ears for music, this one voracious reading, this one a fierce love of spouse, children, cousin, sister, brother, grandchild, parent. I am steady and strong, built by your tender intensity. In me you have built a habitat for humanity. My mother, my father, with their heart of gold, have gifted me their humanity.

Getting Rid of Baby

2011-01-24T09:58:00.000-08:00

There's nothing like a helium balloon to really put me in a mood.

It started when I was a nanny. I learned that a three-year-old does not understand the worth of a balloon in tears. In a normal world we'll say the loss of an above average, helium filled, purple balloon with a ribbon attached is worth maybe seven or eight tears. We'll even generously double that if the balloon floated off into the blue yonder during the first five minutes of ownership.

But in a three-year-old world one can devote hours of tears to the loss of a balloon. As well as innumerable howls, thrashings, surprisingly conversant epithets, and a good deal of begging.

Of course not all balloons are created equal. Some are the very pedestrian monochromatic, tear drop variety while others are. . .say, giant mylar baby heads.

Evidently if you are a lawyer having a baby, your other lawyer friends give you a giant, mylar, baby head balloon at your baby shower. And if you are a really nice lawyer (which I would argue is more common than some might suppose), and my sister-in-law you give the balloon to my kids.

It's ok.

You didn't know.

How could you know about the balloon calamity of 1995?

How could you know that one balloon and three children is Armageddon? Or that a floating ballon - especially one with a giant head - in a car with three children is a safety hazard in the same way that the space shuttle reentering the earth's atmosphere is a safety hazard?

All this aside, it's kind of a disturbing balloon. Which, as I think on it now, may be why you gave it away in the first place.

My kids adopted this ballon as they might have adopted a kitten; squeals of delight, petting, bickering over who gets to hold it, chasing it, and yanking it away from each other. Cecily darted around the older two yelling "I want the giant baby! Give me the giant baby!"

As we were getting ready to leave the house the other day I told the kids that we could not go anywhere until the giant baby was gone, as it was still floating aimlessly and ever lower inside the van.

They ran out to "take care of " giant baby so we could get on with our outing.

However, when I got to the car all children were quietly buckled into their seats waiting for me to discover this:

"Can we keep it, Mom? Huh, can we, can we."

I'd still like to jab a pin right into one of those giant rosy cheeks.

Santa Struts and Frets His Hour Upon The Wrong Stage

2011-01-13T11:34:00.000-08:00

Christmas is different as an adult than a child.

Las year I really created Christmas - in so far as I am able. I wrapped many presents, stuffed stockings, and made a big wall of wrapping paper covering the entrance to the family room which the kids were not meant to brake through until they came to get us. Of course the kids woke up and immediately broke through the paper like wild Christmas bulls and emptied all the stockings before coming to get us.

I'm not much of a creator when it comes to special events. Holidays come, holidays go and more often than not it was just a number on the calendar with a nod from the crowd in our house.

This is not the way kids want to experience holidays. They want the magic of twinkle lights and tinsel. They want the breathtaking possibility that a big fat man in red, or a little Irish man in green came to visit while they were asleep. They want tracks from the abominable Easter bunny leaving evidence of a hurried escape through the spring mud of our back garden. They want to plaster the walls with pink hearts before Dad gets home so he knows it is Valentine's day.

My problem is three fold:

Time

Money

Deception

We'll go with the last since time and money are obvious and boring.

We had some friends over for dinner several weeks ago who asked if we had any Christmas traditions. Aside from peaches and whipped cream on waffles for breakfast and . . . gifts (if that counts), we don't really have any traditions. Our friends were starting a new tradition with their children. A kind of advent activity where the kids open a small wrapped gift each day of December. Inside is an activity for everyone to do as a family, e.g. drink hot chocolate, sing Christmas songs, visit Temple square, read a story, play a board game, have a fire, etc.

This would provide all the magic of Christmas my kids could hope for at their age. It would make up for Caroline's disappointment that there were no packages under the tree with a tag that said "From Santa". Despite filled stockings she is convinced Santa skipped our house.

But the jury is still out when it comes to Santa in our house. I don't really talk about it. I am evasive with their questions. I confirm and deny nothing.

Sometime in December Caroline said to me "Mom, did you know that Christmas is not just about Santa, it's about Jesus too. You never told me that. My primary teacher told me that."

WHAT!?

Yes I did!

And what do you mean too?

Christmas is about Jesus, not Santa.

Except Santa is fun, and the tradition is fun, and the possibility is fun. They just need to have their own holidays. It seems ridiculous and almost impossible as a parent to carry on these incompatible parallel holidays. Either we have a day to celebrate the birth of Christ, and a separate Father Christmas, gift giving day, or we just drop the whole Santa charade entirely.

The Scene:

Four innocent, guileless children sitting on the couch.

Me: Kids, there is NO Santa Claus. He is imaginary. Your Dad and I fill your stockings after you go to sleep on Christmas eve. There is only Jesus, the Son of God, and Savior of mankind.

Kids: Tears.

Truth comes in blows -- as they say.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Because we force them to share a holiday. They've got no business fraternizing. We should not thrust the imminent disappointment of a Santa-less world onto the same stage as Deity.

Matt told me a story (half the details of which I am sure I will get wrong) about a little girl who learned in a short period of time that Santa is not real, the Easter Bunny is not real and the Tooth Fairy is not real. Her next tearful question for the parents she had trusted so well was inevitably "Is Jesus real?"

How can children navigate the nature of our deception?

Should they have to?

I like getting presents.

I like giving presents.

I don't see how it relates to celebrating the birth of Christ.

In light of this Christmas dichotomy I propose a new tradition for my family. I would like to add a day to our celebration of the birth of the Saviour. A day that stands apart from the traditional, commercial version of Christmas. I'm not sure yet how to do this. I'll think on the details and see what emerges in December of 2011.

I'm open to suggestions. Have you figured out how to give your children truth and magic simultaneously?

The Good, The Bad, and The . . . Oh, I Can't Say It

2010-12-30T13:38:00.000-08:00

Yep, that's me in the red lipstick.

Is it?

I hardly recognize myself. You might have that problem as well.

Because the truth is, if you were to knock on my door any given morning I would most likely look something more like this:

Surrounded by kids, no makeup, probably not showered, likely in pajamas - depends on if the clock has struck noon yet.

This, of course, is the naked nitty gritty of it:

There has never been a not-beyond-unflattering photo taken of me on Christmas morning (This being Christmas 2006). I have come to terms with this rendering of me. But I like the first one better. The photo of me with the kids is truth, flanked before and after by extremes that are only marginally representative of Jessica.

Our Stake Youth Presidencies - that would be Matt and Co. hosted an incredible evening on Wednesday last. A 1940's themed dinner and dance with special guests from each ward who came to tell us about their own experiences in the 1940's.

Teenagers and octogenarians fraternizing with some middle aged arbitration. No intimation that there were any disputes between our young and old, merely a means of "settling the differences" between young and old. There are a great many 'differences' stacked up in the 70 years between 84 and 14. And there is a great deal of good in throwing these unlikely dinner companions together.

After the dinner we all convened to the ballroom where a live orchestra and some experienced swingers awaited our frisky feet. A whole lot of 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2. Matt swung me round on my red shoes until my smile hurt like the day I got married and my muscles could barely hold my legs up. Our dear Hilda - A German who escaped to America during the war and is now a RoseParker through and through - held Ewan all evening while Matt and I danced. I tried twice to relieve her of the 12 pound burden but she wouldn't relinquish him.

In honor of dancing with my husband I wanted to look pretty:

This is nearly three hours worth of pretty.

Three hours!?

That's ridiculously self indulgent. As is the posting of so many photos of myself. Justified only by the fact that one must keep a record of the day they curled their hair. Which did not translate into curls for a day. Despite using approximately ALL the gel and hairspray I own, these were curls for . . . maybe two and a half hours.

This is me being Chani:

Matt calls it my poser lips.

Chani is a poser. That's why she always tilts the scale toward 'gorgeous' in her photos. She poses good.

Matt is right - those are poser lips - I do not regularly arrange my face thus. But I have a round face and this lengthens it in a Grace Kelly kind of way.

And I had best not go on in this opening of Pandora's Box of insecurities of the common housewife. As if having a round face were something to be ashamed of.

This is me being Grandma Leavitt:

I can see that this is a photo of my face in some particulars, but I have captured the era of Marba Rose in her youth - the mature kind of youth that comes before the mature kind of old.

If you look closely you can see the wrinkles at the corner of my eye.

Matt pointed them out to me a few days ago and said "We're getting old."

I said "You're getting old, I am the ageless Madonna."

He said "Madonna is fifty and nasty."

I said "The other Madonna."

He said "That's blasphemous."

I said "So is pointing out your wife's wrinkles."

Ok, this was not actually the conversation we had. It went something more like this:

Matt: I can see little wrinkles at the corners of your eyes. We're getting older.

Me: Yep.

Because what else do you say to such an inconvenient truth?

But while Matt and I danced, a fresh bloom of a youth who was once Matt's student asked him what year he was born. He was a bit evasive with her question.

"I have a secret for you," I told her, "I am a year older than him."

"NO WAY!" She exclaimed. "You look way younger than him."

It was kind of dark so I'm guessing she couldn't see my wrinkles.

p.s.

See what I mean about the round face:

That is my real smile belying my real love for Matt.

A Crowd of Small Adventures: BANG BANG

2010-12-15T08:17:00.000-08:00

It's no secret that I am not immersed in the world of cool - the world of hip young singles (or pseudo singles as the case may be).

When it comes to music, I live vicariously. I suppose I always have. As a child it was my father's midnight vinyls that commanded my listening ear - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Joni Mitchell et al. As a teenager it was my big sister, my cool cousins bringing me Depeche Mode, Erasure, OMD, The Cure. In adulthood I could very well be hidden in the avalanche of popular-gone-Sesame-Street, e.g. Feist counting 1-2-3-4 monsters, or penguins, or chickens - that is, children could rule my musical ear if I let them. But NO. It cannot be so.

Instead I look to my kid sister as my new proxy. Chani kept singing after high school madrigals. She sings still. First in a group called Rubik's Hotel, and now an up and coming group in Las Vegas called Dusty Sunshine. She's hooked up in the local scene and passes on new gems to me.

Here is one:

A Crowd of Small Adventures

That is my cousin, Jack Wilcox singing and playing guitar, and nearly stepping on the lizard. I remember Jack as a very quiet, very blonde little boy at the family Christmas party every year at my grandparent's house. Who knew he could command so much attention by standing and singing in front of people. He has a unique voice, both lyrically and acoustically.

Chani happens to be in this video for a small moment - one of the onlookers at the boxing ring. Her boyfriend, Scott is one of the Thompson boys who created the video. Mike and Jerry Thompson directed it while Scott was working the camera - or at least one of the cameras. They have done some other videos and even a feature length film called Thor at the Bus Stop, which is the makings of a serious cult classic.

My kids and I love this song - Bang Bang - and the video. We hope you like it too. For your viewing pleasure you can check out a few more videos by the Thompson Brothers at Vimeo.

And you can find more songs by A Crowd of Small Adventures here.

I'm Not a Witch, I'm Your Wife

2010-12-14T09:27:00.000-08:00

Maren calls it the WITCHING HOUR.

I have heard Susie call it the ARSENIC HOUR.

Whatever it is, it deserves capitals and it deserves attention. The hour before dinner, the hour at the end of many in the house with small children, the hour after naps, the hour before Dad gets home. The hour we want to quit.

I know the pernicious ticking of these minutes mingled with the cries of all who live here making exhaustive demands for ridiculous unrealistics.

Let's paint the picture:

I am at the sink trying to clean up the kitchen so I can cook something to feed this family of children who will likely refuse the food I put in front of them when finally we sit at the table too late for our own good.

Ewan has been fed but is still crying while he reclines in the swing that mostly just spells a.b.a.n.d.o.n.e.d to him.

" I want a cookie, Mom!"

"No, we are eating dinner in an hour."

"I can't wait that long, I'm hungry."

"You just had a bowl of yogurt and a graham cracker. You can wait for dinner."

"YOU ARE MEAN, MOM"

"Please don't yell, Caroline."

"I want to hold you."

"I can't, Cecily. I need to make dinner."

"I don't want my dinner - it's gross. I want to hold you."

"No Cecily."

"Is that blue fire, Mom?"

"CECILY, get AWAY from the stove."

My yelling is of course only a measure of safety, trying to scare her away from the flame, but it inevitably scares her into whimpering tears and I am forced to hold her while I should be attending to the cooking of whatever is on the stove.

Ewan is screaming by now. Cecily's wounded feelings are unsoothable, Caroline is still begging and accusing me of meanery, while Jonah refuses to clear the table off, stamping back and forth through the kitchen declaring how unfair it is that he cannot go outside to play.

I am crippled, standing in the midst of our mess from breakfast, lunch, lessons, coloring, half hearted attempts at working on Christmas gifts, cutting, paper, glue, dolls, boxes, markers, junk mail, books, candy wrappers, dirty socks, dirty diapers, crackers, cracker crumbs, blankets covered in spit-up, shirts covered in spit-up, damp towels, leaves, math sheets, sticks. I am rendered impotent by the milieu of stuff and the milieu of noise.

And then Matt walks in.

How often he enters this cacophony of trouble when his day at work has ended. How seldom is he met with my smile, dinner, happy children.

Need.

We greet him with need . . . thinking little of the needs he brings with him. His daily salutation as he comes through the door, fairly certain of the scene that awaits him, is "I'm here to help." And help he does. My good husband, gallant knight, swooping in to restore some idea that family is good and we can actually enjoy each other.

As yet, this circadian demise of my good self has not driven me to arsenic. But I would do well to remember when my husband walks through the door that like Billy Crystal's little henchwoman in The Princess Bride, "I'm not a witch, I'm your wife." As witching as the hour may be, as tempted as I may be to lash out at the man who fathered my chaos and leaves me to it each day, I am wife - not witch. His 'leaving me to it' is fulfillment of his duty to provide for us in a way that I could not. We live by the bargain of accepting our roles.

I told Matt the other night that I had figured out why we sleep. God knew that mothers and fathers would need desperately to arrive at the quotidian moment when they could lay the little bodies of their children in their beds and find enough quiet for enough hours to reset their tolerance for the work of parenting.

This is not a diatribe against my children, or my luck to be their mother. It is the truth of it; my weakness, their imperfection, our parallel attempt at being a family.

Life with children is hard and hard and hard, punctuated by moments of pure illumination. So let there be light.

Homeschooling Requires Jelly Beans

2010-11-23T10:04:00.000-08:00

WHY ? why? Why?

Why do we homeschool?

This is the question a psychologist asked me two years ago with great incredulity when I went to her for help during my dark days of postpartum depression. It's a fair question, especially for someone feeling overspent, overworked, underslept, and overangry.

The answer to this question eluded me then as it does now. I have read books about why other people choose to homeschool and I relate with some of their reasons. I get catalogs from the great amorphous right-wing, conservative Christian homeschooler guild that is sure I am homeschooling so that the infidels in the schools won't whisper the name of "Darwin" to my little darlings, lest they be convinced there is no God.

I don't order from those catalogs .

And Darwin is not why we homeschool. Unless that is to say there would not be opportunity in public school to answer or explore all the questions my children have about who he was and what he did . We do have opportunity to indulge curiosity in a way that cannot be done by a teacher in a classroom. I have a finite number of curious minds to indulge. The logistical impossibilities are stacked high against teachers from the outset. I can't blame them for the parameters that restrict their abilities.

I am Christian and I admit this does play a part in my WHY. We don't watch television in our house. It is bad for us. This is a personal choice that has made us a happier family. We do not have any video/computer games in our home. Again, this has helped us turn to other forms of entertainment and engagement - namely each other. These choices stem from our Christianity, our own interpretation of how we, as a family, can prepare to know Christ. I do think that the influence of media and gaming found swirling around in the brew of popular culture in the public school is at odds with our choices as parents.

This, of course, may be considered being overprotective.

tomato - tomahto

I think I mostly find my Why in being privy to my children's moments of discovery. If I sent them elsewhere for their education I would not see the first stitches of recognition as they sew a new concept to their own young collection of ideas.

I am rewarded constantly by the time I give to my children in the name of education.

Jonah does a timed math sheet every day - one minute to complete 25 addition facts. The point is not necessarily finish all 25, but to continue to improve and get as many right as possible, an effort at proficiency. Jonah only sees the 25 that need to be completed and we have gone through many days of tears for the blank addition facts glaring at him at the end of one very short minute.

The crying.

Ughh, the crying.

One day I said to him, "Jonah, you don't need to be so devastated if you don't finish every addition fact."

Without hesitation he responded "Just give me some jelly beans if I feel devastated."

Caroline and I did a reading lesson yesterday; number 64 of 100 - the 100 that are in the lesson book. There will be a thousand more lessons over the next few years as we read together regularly. She has a story to read each day and they are getting longer. Yesterday's story was a full page and at the outset she slumps her body into the refusal posture that tells me we will be at it for a long time and each word will require frustrating coercion on my part. The battle ensued. But it was a funny story, as most of them are, about a boy who tries to send his mother a card but a cop gets it instead, and it inspired her to make two beautiful cards for me that said "Mom" with hearts and flowers.

Jonah and I read Shakespeare. Not the intense, full language Shakespeare that will come several years from now. And not the Henry V Shakespeare that is best left until one has developed a true appreciation for the slightly more approachable plays. We have read children's versions of the plays that make us laugh.

It did not occur to me the other day as we read Romeo and Juliet that the end of this story was very different from As You Like It or A Midsummer Night's Dream.

While Romeo was kissing the lifeless lips that would soon warm giving Juliet her turn to find the death of love lying poisoned beside her, Jonah was already crying. When Juliet turned the dagger on herself Jonah's crying became full sobs that wracked his little body. I couldn't finish. He had his head in his hands, full of tears, while he asked over and over "Why would he write this, why would he write this?"

When Jonah calmed enough to talk I finished the last few paragraphs where the Montagues and Capulets vow to resolve their differences for the sake of the lost youths.

I told Jonah, "It's not a true story."

"I know," he said, "it's just so sad."

"Why do you think Shakespeare wrote a story like that?" I asked him.

"To torture someone."

"Do you learn anything from it?"

"It teaches you one thing," Jonah acquiesced, "never quarrel, because bad things might happen and it all turns out horrible in the end."

Had I any jelly beans that day, I would have offered them as balm to his devastation.

Strangely, my biggest regret with this experience was that Jonah will never discover Romeo and Juliet for the first time again. The tragedy is known to him no matter how many times he reads it or sees it on stage. But at the same time I am so glad that I was with him to talk through his visceral response to a very unhappy ending. That is the gift of homeschooling.

A week may turn out very different form my vision on Sunday night of our next round of lessons. This week there has been letter writing to Norway, philosophical discussion about the nature of curfews imposed by Henry Plantagenet in England, uncovering Herculaneum (the lesser known city destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 A.D.), a trip to Temple Square to participate in another homeschooler's geography project, watching the leaves sprout on our sweet potato immersed in water, and the creation of two very impressive versions of pages from The Book of Kells.

It's a good week.

Without Invitation

2010-11-03T08:46:00.000-07:00

Here is something I will not do again:

Google images of spiders.

Spiders are disconcerting in the best circumstances, but coming at me in ultra close-up, or ultra millions from my computer screen makes my arms feel week from the inside. My mind sends the cold sting of venom into my fingers.

I don't hate spiders. I don't love spiders.

I recognize that spiders eat other undesirable living things in my house, but they are their own kind of creepy. I find them hiding in my pile of towels in the laundry room more often than I care to. A strange red, crustacean looking fellow that ends up atrophied in the bottom of my washing machine if it does not escape before the awful drowning. I see the hairier type lounging in the upper corners of the house. I find them scurrying across the white tile in my basement - a flash of dark hoofing it from one hiding place to the next before I can bring down the nearest Animal Atlas in one crushing blow atop the offender.

This past week spiders have invited themselves into my days with no thought to how unwelcome they might be.

The Spider Encounters

Sitting in the dining room I hear Cecily scream in primal waves from the stairs. I lay the baby on the floor and run to rescue her from whatever injury has just befallen her. She is visibly unharmed but cannot stop screaming and shaking. On the step beside her - difficult to see in the carpet that camouflages its bulbous body - is a spider making a leisurely escape. Cecily is crying now, trying to speak through her tears, "My toes . . . 'pider on my toes, 'pider on my toes. Scary Mama."

"Did that spider walk on your toes?"

"Yes," she sobs.

"Did it bite you?"

"Yes"

But it has been several days now and multiple inspections have revealed no spider bite. It just walked across her lily white toes which nearly killed her from fright - no venom necessary.

II.

Bringing the kids in from the car after a late Saturday evening at the Homestead. We are herding them down the stairs directly to their beds. I hold Ewan and walk right behind Matthew while he carries Cecily. While he is descending the stairs a spider is descending it's thread such that I think they are going to collide about face/shoulder level. He cannot see the spider, and it is happening too fast for me to warn him. But they just miss each other. Matt makes it to the bottom of the stairs and I wait for the spider to reach the floor so I can make sure to step on it on my way down.

III.

I am driving. There is a mosquito zipping about in the space between me and the windshield that I cannot kill despite much thumping and waving of my hands. It mocks my iron fist with skilled evasive maneuvers. As I approach irate frustration and reckless driving that will surely put the four children I have buckled into my van in jeopardy the mosquito seems to stop mid air near the bottom of the windshield. I realize it has been caught in a spider's web. I laugh out loud to think that I could not bring down this little flying creature but some spider hiding out in my van has got the thing absolutely. There is obviously no escape for the mosquito that is now a meal. This is funny until . . .

IV.

A few days later I buckle the kids into the van after trick-or-treating at Grandpa's office. We say goodbye to Matthew as he drove separately and I slide into the driver's seat when I catch a glimpse of a FAT, hairy thing dart across the top of my windshield. My first thought as I am ejecting myself at light speed out of the car is "I know why you are so fat." This is no ordinary spider - as most arachnid close encounters are of the extraordinary variety. I reach in to find something with which to vanquish the oversized brute. All I come out with is a little packet of papers stapled together that is surely one of Caroline's homemade books. I position it with great care fearing that my one shot at annihilation will result in the thing jumping out at my face instead of being crushed on contact. My strike is swift and successful, resulting in a morbid crunch beneath my fingers and a brown smear across the glass. A little sign of Halloween cheer. Luckily I have baby wipes on hand.

I might have spared him since he took care of the mosquito for me, but the cardinal rule of insect eating spiders is that they must keep themselves unseen. Had he hidden in the depths of wherever I would have let him be.

It was his mistake, not mine.

Number Four and The Help just left

2010-10-12T21:58:00.000-07:00

I am plus a baby

minus a mother

Again.

___

We have a new baby.

There are tell tale signs. The most patent of these being when I pushed him out. So. . . I'm pretty sure.

Here are some others:

As predicted, my belly is not big and tight any more, it is big and gushy.

I sleep really well now - but only for about three hours at a time.

My kids have watched Matilda 26 times in one week.

We have done no lessons in three weeks.

I sit in my rocker for hours every day.

I have read three books in three weeks.

I don't go to church anymore.

___

Here is the sure sign that the mother is gone - the MOTHER - the I can do anything despite being sixty something and in pain most of the time MOTHER:

Tears.

That's the sure sign that she is gone.

The airport scene was awful. Since Cecily was pretty much resigned to having lost me as a person who could do anything for her over the month that Nana was here, I was pretty sure parting would be most painful for her. When I pulled the car up to the drop-off curb the tears started, but not for Cecily. Nana cried which made Jonah cry, and Caroline cry, but not Cecily.

Cecily turned her head. She wouldn't say goodbye, she wouldn't give Nana a hug. Her eyes were confused and filled with tears she would not let spill over. I suppose she thought if she wouldn't say good bye, Nana wouldn't go.

I got out to hug my Mom and steal from her little frame any emotional strength she might have in reserve to fortify myself for the remainder of the day. My first day of me and four kids by myself. After having her here for a month, letting go was difficult.

I thought it was difficult for me, but when I looked back at the car Jonah and Caroline were standing in the front of the van, both of them sobbing into their hands, giving a sad little wave every now and again and then dropping their tearful faces while their shoulders shook with the awful grief of it all.

We waved to Nana as we drove away, Ewan crying by this time as well. But still Cecily was quiet. Until we made our way through the drop-off circuit and headed for the freeway. Jonah and Caroline had quieted by then and Cecily's little voice declared "I want to say goodbye. I WANT TO SAY GOODBYE." She sensed the reality of separation. She was desperate. As we came around heading east on I-80 Cecily saw a plane taking off just in front of us and waved yelling, "Goodbye Nana, Goodbye!"

Nita Sue - you specialize in making yourself utterly indispensable - on both sides of the country. I hear they are crying their own tears back in New York waiting for you to come home.

The next morning, when I got Cecily our of bed I changed her diaper for the first time since Ewan was born. Nearly a month of her little two-year-old bottom being farmed out to be cleaned up by other hands.

It took me nearly a week to do my first load of laundry. And I've yet to fold it.

Good bye Nana.

We miss you.

Make Do

2010-09-09T10:41:00.000-07:00

We do not live near any ocean - not the Pacific, not the Atlantic, and really not the Indian. We are land locked in North America.

I was nine years old the first time I saw an ocean . . . and a beach - oh the waves, and the rocks, and the shells, and the sand of it all. Sand under my naked toes, sand wet and sand dry, sand castles (or lumps), sand holes that fill with water from below, and sand in all the crevices beneath by bathing suit when we got back to the motel.

Our trip to the ocean was really a trip to Disneyland. The beach was an afterthought to Mickey, but it may have been the more formative experience for me.

Our family was without great means when I was a child. I didn't notice much, but I'm guessing if I were to see the household income verses expenses from that period of my life it might all work out to a bottom line of "approximately destitute." Like, meat was the venison my Dad brought home from a hunt, and spending cash for my sister and I were the few dollars we brought home from peddling home made cookies through the streets in our rusted wagon.

I loved my childhood. I never felt poor. Not even when Grah and I combed through the rubbish bin looking for interesting things to play with - empty bottles of any sort, that was our real bounty - we had an apothecary of plastic shampoo bottles that kept us entertained for . . .well, our childhood.

So my Mom coming up with the money to get our family of five to Disneyland was no ordinary feat. I'm guessing she didn't do anything illegal to get the cash - she's just not like that.

I'm guessing she sacrificed a few of her own necessities - she's just like that.

When the money was ready she loaded us all in the Dreaded Dormammu - our red and silver Volkswagen Bus - and we left Cedar City for the very foreign experience of California. We got as far as a few miles past Mesquite before the Dreaded Dormammu made some dreaded sounds and puttered to a stop on the side of the desert highway.

My Dad declared the trip a resounding failure and we would have to make our way home some how.

My Mom used words she doesn't normally use and declared the trip in full swing and it was up to him to find a solution.

She won.

The story is; Dad starts walking back to Mesquite, nice couple in a Mercedes stop to pick up the Damsel in distress along with her three children. Nice couple turns around to fetch Dad. Uncle in Mesquite takes care of the Dreaded Dormammu. Nice couple picks up their second Mercedes in Glendale that they let my Dad drive. We caravan to Vegas where my grandparents lend us their car and we drive to Anaheim the next day.

Thank you nice couple with two Mercedes who let strangers drive your cars.

My nine year old heart might have broken into sad little pieces had we not made it to California. It was my life's adventure at that age.

I ached to see Disneyland.

I ached to see Los Angeles.

I ached to see the beach.

So now, when Jonah tells me he "really, really, really" wants to see the ocean, I know how he feels. He is seven. Time is ticking away for our inland selves, and he grows impatient. Mountains and canyons are nothing to scoff at. We have some of the most stunning the world has to offer, but the unknown is hopelessly beguiling.

We have tried to plan California, but babies, graduate school, and money seem bent on keeping those 682 miles as distant as say, the Arctic.

On a whim, Matt decided to offer the children the nearest beach available to us on Monday.

It is a beach not without some faults, namely that it is the shore of the Great Salt Lake - which is not as much great as it is foul smelling. But there is water and there is sand, and if you live landlocked it is actually more fun than I imagined it would be.

So until I do as my mother did when I was nine, and figure out what I can give up for long enough to pay for the trip to California, we can make do with the remains of what Jonah calls "the Ancient Lake Bonneville."

Keeping Up With the Artists

2010-09-03T10:10:00.000-07:00

We have two paint shirts, cut from the many white shirts that go "the way of all the earth" after Matt has worn them once or twice a week for two years. These shirts are marked with a history of little people's efforts at creating - it is the art of childhood smeared all up and down the front, or in some cases painted directly on to the shirt as the paper eventually becomes a bit boring. We need a new canvas, they decide, discovering fabric works nicely.

We have two paint shirts but three painters now. The littlest painter came to the table a few days ago after Jonah and Caroline abandoned their post. This abandonment is so strictly against the painting rules I can hardly contain my (anger - which I'm working on) response. They left all their wares and tools scattered across the marginally protected tabletop - far too inviting a scene for a momentarily unsupervised two-year-old.

I found her thus:

Paints are a heady temptation. I experience this temptation regularly, accompanied by the gloomy realization that I have no skills once the paints have been squeezed seductively from the tube. A brush in my hand has such a tentative meeting with canvas - beyond "hello" it really has no conversation. I like to watch my kids paint because their brush and canvas converse fluently.

Cecily is obviously no exception.

And she has christened her own paint shirt.

When Matt's currently white shirts are discarded to make way for a new batch of new white, I will snag two more for the little painters.

Perhaps I should keep one for myself and call it my painting smock. Perhaps it will sufficiently clothe my artistic apprehension such that I can smear paint on paper without fear.

Be warned - a little paint tray, left unattended, sporting an array of colors such as this might tempt your little ones, or even yourself beyond forbearance.

Two suggestions:

1. If you buy paints you must emotionally disconnect yourself from your children's clothes.

2. Buy a piece of duck cloth or canvas that can be easily unrolled to cover the table generously - it alleviates anxiety.

Forefathers and My Father

2010-08-18T15:09:00.000-07:00

I know that everyone knows this part by now - the part where I can do almost nothing but sit on my bed. This pregnant body betrays me . . . or is true to me. I can't tell which one. I read recently a woman who at some point in her seventh pregnancy came to this realization; I can grow this baby as long as I don't do anything else. That's how I feel - capable of this thing my body does by itself with no conscious effort from me, but nothing else.

So, to get three kids in the car and go to the Utah Museum of Natural History is, well, a bit ludicrous. But I have a Community Exploration card good through the end of August that grants us free entrance into the Natural History Museum, Discovery Gateway, Red Butte Garden, and the Fine Arts Museum. Never mind that my belly is contracting, my feet swollen, my back tight and aching - we will eek out these free experiences before the baby comes, and before my kids go crazy in the doldrums of summer.

Side note - Discovery Gateway has been permanently removed from my list of worthwhile things to do with the children. Unless the establishment would like to grant us a family night all our own.

Insanity. Times ten. With pigtails and petulance.

"Other people's kids."

That's what Matt always says. As if ours were . . . well they aren't. But we like them best.

On this trip - to the museum, where there are things of actual interest, we listen to music. Jonah and Caroline demand songs from the MP3 as soon as we get in the car.

"Play such and such."

"No, play this one first."

"No, I don't want that one."

"You always pick first."

"I never get a turn."

Until we end up with some Miley Cyrus (I'm embarrassed that this is on the MP3, but there is a reason outside my own music taste, and now that I have an Apple computer, I can't remove it) song, that makes me cringe. Where did they gain such an interest in Top 40, pop, teeny bopper music?

But not always. Sometimes it is Fleet Foxes, Mykonos. Or Sufjan Stevens, Decatur. The Eagles, Waiting in the Weeds. Or Feist, Joni Mitchell, Ingrid Michaelson, Jennifer Warnes, Kings of Convenience, Loreena McKennit, Landon Pigg, Hungry Cloud - music being passed to them intentionally.

Today it is Dan Fogelberg - Forefathers. This is Caroline's choice, taken from the playlist I made in December for my Dad, when I thought he might die, when he wouldn't wake up, when his heart quit working.

A massive heart attack took him from upright to open heart surgery, to unconscious for five days. My Mom and I took turns sitting by his side nearly every hour of each of those days, but he was not be woken peacefully. Like a bear he was, like a lion in a cage, thrashing his big body about such that there was no choice but to keep the sedatives dripping into his blood and his captive consciousness. We felt very tearfully helpless.

Aubrey felt the most helpless being three thousand miles away. In her geographic impotence she offered a suggestion that I think made all the difference. "Take him some music. Just play his favorites for him, soft things that will help subdue his subconscious while they try to wake him up."

I did. Within a few hours I had collected the music that lives in my Dad's soul, the music he would set on the turntable under the alchemy of a needle that would give us song and just a bit of crackle at midnight when we should all have been asleep, but were instead being infused with the stuff that brought musical magic into our home. I put it all on my MP3 player in a playlist titled For Dad.

We played it over and over until Aubrey's prescription lulled him into a kind of dreamy awakening. So many tears for the familiarity of songs that have marked the moments of living for him. Which he seemed then determined to do - live.

Forefathers is the first song on that list. I cannot summarize the poignancy of this song that harbors the foibles of synthesized bagpipes and other sundry sounds of the 80's, but still makes me cry every time I listen to it. The words are a means of bringing me into the center of my familial tapestry. Within it I am placed soundly and happily in all the roles that are the mortar of my identity.

And Caroline says "Mom, this makes me think about Las Vegas."

"How come," I ask.

"Because it sounds like Tickle Grandpa."

"Yes, it does. I have always liked Dan Fogelberg, because I've always thought he sounds like Tickle Grandpa."

And I can see Tickle Grandpa, my Dad, lying in a hospital bed, with a tube down his throat, a machine heaving his mighty chest up - then down - then up, eyelids fluttering from the movement beneath.

I see him sitting up in the same bed, awake, raspy voiced, professing CHANGE on every front. "A mission" he says, "God" and "gospel" woven through all the days that will follow. Professing mistakes and a hushed decree that he will learn to dance - for my Mom - he will learn to dance.

Yes, it sounds like Tickle Grandpa, who is an active forefather, granted time to become so much more to the generations he has borne thus far.

Good choice Caroline.

The Dickens' Debate

2010-07-27T11:15:00.000-07:00

Her 5th birthday started with all of us laying in my bed.

This is how pretty much every day starts at the moment.

After many years of grappling with A Tale of Two Cities, I was determined to finish the last thirty pages before I committed my mind and body to any of the heavy duties of the day - like feeding everyone breakfast.

Jonah asked me to read aloud. His request came in the most critical, emotional, purposeful pages of the book. I read with tears barely held at bay. I gave voice to Sydney Carton as the unlikely Christ figure. We rode with the tumbrils through Paris to meet Madame La Guillotine. We followed the clicking, knitting Defarge en route to an unexpected encounter with Miss Pross. We were jostled in the heart thumping carriage of the little party desperate to abandon la vie francaise. Jonah held on to every word - enraptured. Caroline said, "When can I open my presents?"

What!?

Presents?

Oh yeah. . . it's her birthday.

"Caroline," Jonah retorted with frustration, "we have to find out what happens."

"But I want to open my presents from Granny."

"Ugh," he replies, "if only you understood the glory of books."

"I know the glory of books," Caroline demands.

"No, I mean like, figuring out something new, and . . . the magical way the author tells the story."

"Well, I just want to open my presents."

And it is her birthday, so Dickens will have to wait another ten minutes to render the conclusion of his tale that has taken me nearly fifteen years to read.

We open presents.

We play.

We finally come to that famous sentence:

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."

How did he do it - Dickens that is - The first and last sentence of this book are arguably the most famous in English literature - except for maybe a few of Shakespeare's.

We eat pancakes per birthday request.

The culmination of our birthday celebration came in the evening when I used Caroline's new curling iron to put curls in her hair, dress in her fanciest dress, take a picture in the front garden, and dine at the Olive Garden - a very rare outing for our family.

Books are good. A Tale of Two Cities might be one of the best. But someday Jonah will also know the glory of children - his own - a little girl turning five. Even Dickens would have yielded to that glory.

"Retire to thy bed early..." - but probably not all day.

2010-07-23T11:09:00.000-07:00

Twelve hours in my bed did a good deal towards reducing the permanent, pregnant swelling in my feet.

Last night I laid down at 8pm with the thought that I needed just a few moments to gather my strength before getting three children into their own beds. Sometime in the dark of night, I awoke with my husband asleep beside me and all three of those children in their beds, asleep, without my having contributed to the effort in any way.

While I showered this morning Matt asked what my plans were for the day. "To lay in bed as long as I can" I answered (in slight jest). I really liked the idea that if I stayed in bed the next two days I might be able to wear shoes to church on Sunday. But that wasn't really my plan. My plan is almost always to clean the house. My plan is waylaid nearly every day. Plus taking a shower these days requires nearly an hour of recumbent recovery, so I did, in fact, end up on the bed for some time afterward.

Caroline poured cereal and milk for herself in the dining room, but came to me so she could pray before eating. She was ok to eat by herself, but not pray by herself. She prays consistently for me that I will not have "a heartburn", like she prays for Tickle Grandpa not to have "a heart attack." I wonder how the two are related in her mind and figure I had better help her understand that there is actually no correlation at all nor is there any danger of imminent death for me.

She asked in her blessing on the cereal growing soft and unpalatable in the other room, that "the Bishop will get lots of tithing so he can buy lots of Books of Mormon and so he can give money to people who need it." I amen this prayer earnestly. There are so many things the Bishop does that I am both grateful for, and grateful I do not have to do. Not that I would mind giving people money, but exercising the wisdom and confidently gaining inspiration as to who should receive the money and how much holds no allure for me.

While I sat in bed - still recovering from the shower - Jonah and Caroline decided to pretend they were attending to me in a kind of salon for pregnant, suffering women. They each took a foot to treat with pumice stone and lotion, then rubbed my legs with a dazzlingly satisfying cream called "Lucky Legs" that Chani bought for me at Pea in a Pod, said to relieve the discomfort of swollen legs. It is minty and cool and an hour later my legs still feel better.

Finally, approaching noon, the kids ask if they can wake Cecily up so they can play restaurant with the play-kitchen in her room. I figure noon is a decent hour at which to waken the child that seems to be able and willing to sleep any length of time if left to herself.

We are all up now - no one left wasting away the day in bed. We'll see how close we come to a clean house today, the possibility of making something for dinner, keeping the kids busy, moving the sprinkler as Matt has asked.

Clean house...

Swollen feet...

It's a good life whatever the close of this day brings.

Your Mark Is Permanent

2010-07-11T19:08:00.001-07:00

There are signs of my mother everywhere.

The last load of laundry that she put through my washer and dryer, still waiting to be folded.

The last two pieces of cheesecake and raspberry sauce in my refrigerator that she made for me on my birthday.

The scraps of towel she tore apart and used to clean my hardwood floor - that had not been truly cleaned in the six years we have lived in this house.

The towel she brought me to replace the one she tore up which happened to be a bit raggedy but still one of my favorites. The one she brought is my new favorite.

The new pillows she bought for me that support my aching, pregnant body each night and carry me through to a new morning - one day closer to the end of pregnant.

The towels put away in my cabinet that are folded differently than I fold them, but would not be folded at all had she not done it.

The lack of grass choking out my daisies.

The morning glories thriving in the pots on my front porch - growing from seeds she harvested off the dried up vines from last year and planted with the kids.

All the clean clothes left in my children's drawers.

And the empty space she left on the couch . . .in my kitchen. . .my laundry room. . .my garden. . .my inner sense of well being.

Luckily she leaves other signs - the kind that won't fade.

Like homemade macaroni and cheese with red sauce served at our table regularly.

Magenta bottles of pomegranate magic. . .or jelly, whichever you prefer.

Thursday taco night.

Little Cecily saying "Nana, Nana, where Nana, Mama?"

Instilling the confidence in me to keep trying to be a mother.

Organizing my medicine drawer.

Airborne when we feel the slightest itch in the throat.

Stevia for morning oats.

The nightgown she gave me out of her own suitcase after Caroline was born that I wear all the time while I am pregnant and nursing.

Her genes made manifest in my mirrors and my daughters.

#7 on my cell phone speed dial.

My Mom is in New York.

My Mom moved to New York.

She is in my sister's home now.

I know what kinds of things they do together - work - and some play - and make sure to take a nap every day.

Goodbye Mom.

It's alright. The next best thing to doing my laundry is doing Aubrey's. The Hannigs are lucky to have you, even if you don't do any laundry at all. And Heaven knows they've waited long enough to have Nana on that side of the country.

Until September 14th.

"Mom Sorry"

2010-07-03T12:38:00.000-07:00

I yelled at Caroline the other day - Caroline and Jonah. The kind of yell that is borne of my own exhaustion and unrelated frustrations, but comes out as though they have betrayed the very heart of me by . . . playing in the dirt.

The wrong dirt, at the wrong time. I usually don't mind my kids jumping into outside dirty. I had better let them do something, since everything with an electric cord, or batteries makes me get all impatient and irritated. But this was right by the newly planted tomatoes, and fit snugly in the twenty minutes after bath and before bed. So I am the backyard banshee, demanding obedience and some kind of retribution from a four and seven year old. I corral muddy little bodies into the house, pushing them with undo force.

Our back door opens into the house at the top of the stairs to the basement. We have trained ourselves to open gently and slow should there ever be a child at the top of those stairs. A child at the top of those stairs would be bumped right down to the bottom by a door flung open in anger. So when I flung open the door in anger it caught the moment that the baby was making her way through that little square of floor from stairs to kitchen. It also caught the side of her head. I waited for a split second envisioning her tiny body tumbling down too many stairs to the floor that had at least been recently carpeted, instead of the welcome block of hard tile that used to catch my kids when they fell down the stairs.

Instead she screamed and clung to the wall. Anger rushed out of me, replaced by a flood of shame. I left the muddy children, scooped up the crying baby, and locked myself in my bedroom to hide from my own parenting. Cecily and I cried together. Her head was fine. She wiped my tears saying "Mama crying?" Matt eventually came in to sit quietly with me, never chastising me for my ill behavior. Natural consequences worked well enough in this case.

After enough time had passed to make me feel almost ready to go apologize to the rest of my family there was a timid knock on my bedroom door. Caroline came in - no signs of mud and clad in pajamas - to offer her own silent apology.

She explained that she is the little girl in the picture and "The tears are me crying because I made a wrong choice."

I told her I made a wrong choice too, and I'm old, and it still made me cry.

There's No Place Like Home

2010-06-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

Try this on for size.

And just think about that bit of road in front of your house. All the life that passes by, the drama that unfolds within earshot or eyesight of your front door. Does it ever look like my street?

My street is cosmopolitan, metropolitan, thoroughfare of the unlikely, accidental tourist. Except I might be the tourist, and my experience here some days is definitely accidental.

Had I a camera at the time, you might believe the story I will tell. Since I didn't - have a camera - you might think I make these things up to try and get you to move in next door. You would be wrong. Certainly there are better ways to advertise for my neck of the woods.

But if you are reading this, it is likely that I do want you to move in next door.

___

Matt and I are standing on the driveway talking about any number of things we would like to do to the exterior of our house to make it look a little less ghetto-ish.

This is a challenge for a house situated squarely in - and I say this with absolute respect for the neighborhood and community I call home - an indisputable ghetto.

While we talk we hear music approaching in the distance. The kind of music that conjures visions of a souped up, lowered frame Cadillac Deville with shiny chrome trim, gold hubcaps, hydraulic lift, and a little statue of "Our Lady of Guadalupe" hanging from the rear view mirror.

Something like this, vibrating with the kind of base that announces itself several blocks before making an appearance in front of your house.

This car is no stranger to my life. It does actually cruise by every now and again thumping its thump to say hello. . .or beware. . .or ain't we some kinda cool. So I figure that's what's approaching while we stand in the driveway.

It turns out to be another kind of cadillac.

This kind.

Surprise.

There are two boys, both look to be at the latter end of teenage-ness. Both of them wearing ill fitting denim shorts/culottes - because they are not pants and couldn't be called capris. Just big, baggy denim things that showcase whatever manly undergarments a teenage boy wears. And a wife-beater up top without any effort to conceal that particular undergarment.

One boy is pedaling that cadillac bicycle, in recumbent splendor. Leaning way back on what I have always called a banana seat - which my blue, 1982 hand-me-down Schwinn had - and his arms reaching way out in front to grip the elevated handlebars.

There are two speakers affixed mysteriously in the space between the handlebars.

Yes, speakers - the sound part of your home Hi-Fi system.

There is a sub woofer in a trailer attached at the back of the bike.

This is no shoulder mounted ghetto-blaster from the 1980's. This is a proper sound system that would presumably be installed in the body of a Camaro, if only a Camaro were to be had. These boys could very well be in the pre-driving years though, so the wheels they are sporting are probably wicked cool within their circle.

Oh heaven. . .the idea of multiples of this duo. . .absurd.

Because here comes the other boy. He is running; trying to keep those strange pants up, trying to keep his untied, black, hightop sneakers on, trying to keep up with his personal trainer slash sound studio. It's a latino Rocky Balboa moment. Rocky running up and down some really big stairs in Philadelphia, Rocky punching a bag hanging from the rafters of a barn, Rocky hefting an oak tree through Russian snow fields. This boy is preparing for the fight of his life.

I should stop him and make him tie his shoes. But that's so motherly. He's focusing his energy on manhood right now, making muscles, producing testosterone.

Presumably, Dolph Lundgren Jr. is on the east side of town in some Gold's Gym using the high tech equipment and an ipod to ready himself for the fray that looms. He best remember that he'll have to cross the train tracks for this fight.

My money is on the homeboy running past my house. Of course my money is on the homeboy. We're from the same hood. We're practically family.

That is where I live folks. There are people here who've "got my back." I like it that way. Never dull. I just wish I knew where to go cheer for my homeboy.

What did you see on your street today?

Just What are Mary's Cockleshells?

2010-05-28T13:04:00.000-07:00

It's not all that cute - the nursery rhyme scene, or the fairy tale scene. In fact, the Ambleside reading list we use for Jonah's first grade curriculum gives little disclaimers about nasty old hags chopping up children, just in case we should choose to avoid the gore.

We never avoid the gore.

For some reason it makes my kids laugh. Especially Caroline.

Last night we sat at the table after dinner while I preemptively told them a bedtime story to expedite the really long go-to-bed process. My Mom looked aghast as I started the story of two children whose parents couldn't afford to keep them anymore and led them into the forest to secretly abandon them. . .the bread crumbs, the cottage, the old woman, the oven big enough for children, and the roasted lady.

They loved it. Caroline giggled ceaselessly. "And guess what their names were?" I asked, "Jonah and Caroline." Which just set off fits of laughter.

"Ok," I admitted, "it's a real story about two children called Hansel and Gretel, and I'm sure I didn't get any of the details right."

"That is a true story of things that really happened?" Caroline asked. "Well, not exactly," my Mom said. "It's a story that was written by real people but the things in the story did not happen to real people."

This information was, of course, a little disappointing for Caroline. The image of the two children pushing the ill-sighted old woman into her own oven was impressive - one she had hoped to find truth in.

Jonah and I read "Forty Theives" from The Arabian Nights the other day. This is no tale for weak stomachs - pregnant stomachs being deeply entrenched in weakness - my stomach being deeply entrenched in pregnant. Two brothers want nothing more than riches. Kasim finds himself murdered and body quartered for his troubles, while Ali Baba has the luck of employing his brother's servant, the "shrewd and sharp-witted Morgiana,"- who perpetrates the deaths of 38 of the 40 thieves by pouring boiling oil over their heads while they hide in large clay jars.

We read the tale behind "Mary, Mary, quite contrary...", which includes thumb presses, guillotines, and cemeteries as her infamous growing gardens. We read this because I am now in possession of an heirloom, hand stitched, embroidered quilt made by my maternal grandmother that features twelve congenial nursery rhymes.

Tell your kid the "Bloody Mary" story, throw that quilt on them, blow a kiss, say "good night" and turn the lights off. This is a sure way to elicit formidable dreams, should the kid actually reach the sleeping stage.

But I can tell you this, I'd go for the quartering, and roasted old lady before I'd read another knock-off adventure of that insipid, Disney-fied mermaid that I used to really like.

Bed time stories evolve. So does our family. At the moment we've arrived at a benign rendering of the gruesome, but entertaining. Only classics though - no Chucky or other such modern nonsense. We only like classic nonsense.

Can't We Just Watch When We Want?

2010-05-24T18:09:00.000-07:00

I cannot escape the television.

Many of you know we opted for a television-free home a few years ago. The longer we are without, the more I feel relieved and removed from all that television offers. But choosing to evict tv from our home has by no means evicted tv from our lives.

We cannot escape it,

wherever we go;

not in the produce aisle,

not at the checkout stand,

not at the bank,

not at the furniture store,

not at the restaurant,

not at the library.

In the two and a half minutes I waited in the checkout line at Fresh Market the other day, I was shown a new recipe and several home improvement projects that could transform my house. As if strategically placing a Cosmo magazine in front of my face (or worse, my children's face) were not enough, somebody thinks I just can't make it through the line peaceably without placating my wanton behavior, which is so obviously threatening to the cashier. I am known to accost the person behind the register every now and again with a sinister "Hi, how are you today?"

Trying to have a pleasant dinner with Matthew on a rare date night, I had to work diligently to block out the THREE television screens broadcasting different programs within my view. We must have chosen the wrong restaurant.

Maybe people are afraid to be alone together. Maybe television is thought to mitigate the terrible social awkwardness of actually speaking to each other, whether it be the few moments we transact in money with a stranger, the hour we spend on a date with an unfamiliar person, or the hour we spend on a date with a spouse of ten years.

I don't need a television screen behind the librarian to help me feel good about patronizing my local library.

A tv in the lobby does not compel me to trust one particular bank over another.

And I can jolly well select apples without the Food Network plying their wares over my head.

What I could have used was a television screen somewhere inside the plane that flew six long, silent hours from Phoenix to Philadelphia. My grocery store produce aisle wants to hook me with media in the 23 seconds I spend choosing onions, but US Airways is totally uninterested in securing my patronage with a media cocktail even when they have me cornered for six hours. If anyone should be interested in placating wanton behavior, it should be the airlines.

As Long as She Talks, I Laugh

2010-05-19T14:57:00.000-07:00

She is four - only a few more months - five is looming. She lost two teeth while I was in England. That's right she's four and she lost her two bottom, front teeth. But those two teeth came cutting through her three-month-old gums a site too early for our nursing routine. At twelve months my flesh could no longer handle her full set of teeth and we decided to go for the cow option. I suppose with teeth, it is early in, early out.

And with that premature gap in Carolin'es smile she carries on in her funny four year old way - charming me with what comes out of her head, out of her mouth.

A sampling:

"Mom, my clothes are too loosable."

"Wow, that bath was as quick as a camel eating."

"Oh yeah?" I ask. "Do camels eat fast?"

"Yes"

"And do you know what a camel is?"

"Ye-es" in total exasperation.

So, I am pregnant. This means a growing belly, and a growing need for clothes made to accommodate my immensity. Caroline hasn't quite figured out what the special word for those clothes are. Every time I put on one of my bigger than normal tops she asks, "Is that an eternity shirt."

"Yes, in so many ways," I tell her.

Last night we were talking about her preschool graduation that will happen next week. With zeal Caroline declared "I'm graduating from preschool, I'll be in kindergarten next year, and then I'll go to high school."

Yup, something like that.

The other day my friend was lamenting a few of her husband's, shall we say, little imperfections. Not really thinking about children's ears that hear more than we imagine, she asked in rhetorical exasperation "What am I going to do with him?" Caroline answered without missing a beat "Toss him overboard," in her best pirate accent.

Jonah and Caroline are sitting in the back of the van trying to remember the name of one of the boys in Caroline's preschool class who did something funny. Since Jonah spends the five minutes it takes to drop her off making the social rounds, he is friends with pretty much everybody in her class, so he knows all their names. The two of them are ticking off each boy they can think of, but still not coming up with whomever she is thinking of. Finally she pleads in frustration "Come on Jonah, just be in my head."

Impossible.

To be in her head.

A totally unnavigable place is Caroline's head.

The Darwin Disconnect

2010-05-18T09:14:00.000-07:00

A book review - Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution

The controversy - be there any in the first place - is irrelevant. While reading this book on the plane to England the man sitting next to me asked "Is it for, or against?" "Neither," I responded, "it's a biography."

Randal Keynes is the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin and he deals with the life of his progenitor in an objective, scholarly and warm manner. In an interview with Diane Rehm, Keynes said that he wanted to portray Charles through the lens of family. He achieves this primarily through Darwin's wife Emma, and the death of their ten-year-old daughter, Annie. His devotion to science never eclipsed his supreme devotion to family.

Be you a Christian and a Darwinist naysayer, be sure to develop a keen differentiation between what you have to say about the man's science and what you have to say about the man. Although he spent many years determining that, although he would not deny the existence of a God, he could not subscribe to a belief in Jesus Christ, he was most Christian in character. He had great love for and cared deeply about the welfare of other humans. Outside his work as a scientist and father to ten children he did much to help others help themselves.

Those who are "believers" should not look upon Charles Darwin as an object of wholesale derision. As one of history's most iconic figures Darwin is used as epithet, rude caricature, and source of ill-placed humor. His tender nature was wounded by such treatment, so much so, that he delayed the publication of his "Origin of Species" for years, not wanting to subject himself or his family to the scorn that would surely come.

The natural world fueled his development of intellect. Fatherhood heightened his sense of humanity. Both taught him to see terrestrial beauty in a way most of us cannot conceive. His heart was continually swelled with the beauty of form, relationship, emotion, and filial connection. He cried bitter tears over the death of his daughter Annie. Tears made more bitter by his inability to have faith in a life after the one he knew. Although faith could not offer him comfort, love could, and as father to ten children he certainly had no paucity of love. Charles profoundly appreciated life; whether that life came as gift from a Maker, or as the stunning chance of natural selection.

The Sound and Scent of Sunday Morning

2010-05-15T07:06:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning is an open window in the gabled bathroom on the third floor in Roger's limestone Victorian row house on the end of Queen Katherine Street nearest Kendal Castle. Out his front door and a few steps to the right puts one on the footpath up to the castle built around 1200 which housed many a Kendal Baron, most notably Thomas Parr, father to Katherine, the sixth wife of King Henry VIII.

The open window in the bathroom lets in the rousing historicity that hangs in the air of Britain. It flows through and mingles in swirled patterns with the steam from the shower that I can move this way and that with the motion of my hand, like a magic wand. It is England, it is the air that smells of coal fire, verdancy, and the lingering presence of many thousands of years of inhabited soil. The earth is so solidly marked by humans in this place, no respite from the workings of man, which has created the inimitable scent of Britannia. It fills me when I am here. It is the stuff of powerful nostalgia . . . the simple smell of place.

Today I accent the scent of Britannia with John Freida's Sheer Blonde shampoo - a bit of wishing on my part. It is a travel-size bottle I purchased yesterday at Superdrug in the Westmorland Shopping Centre, while in a stupor of travel-induced exhaustion. More than buying shampoo, I wanted to lay my body down on the floor with a pack of Superdrug nappies under my head and let sleep take me. Instead we spent our first 20 pounds on things with which to clean our weary bodies in the week to come - letting our various chemical concoctions slide through the bathroom window and mingle with Britain's olfactory ethos.

I have slept now, my head rested luxuriantly on a pillow, in a bed, rather than a pack of nappies on a tile floor. I am readied for the Sabbath which greets me now, through this same open window, with the ebullient tones of Kendal's bells.

In the ten months we lived here in 2003 and 2004 I opened the patio doors of our very small flat on Garden Road every Sunday morning, without thought to temperature or rain, to welcome the bells of the parish church. The sound seemed to pound in my soul, singing to the part of me that worships and finds the contentment of life in faith. "Ring out Wild Bells" Lord Tennyson proclaims. Oh yes, wild, and sweet, and filling the little space that is my home. And for some reason it feels so French. I've not been there. I've really no experience with all things French, and I can't imagine it to be more transporting than all things English, but there you are. The bells roll in through my wide doors and I am pulled away over the English channel into lands certainly no more magnifique than those I now enjoy.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

This is the last stanza in Tennyson's Ring Out, Wild Bells. They are all beguiling and worth repeating. A fit melody to accompany the hours before I go to worship.

I had not thought of the bells in the many hours on the plane, or the weeks of volcanic anxiety before the plane. They are a sweet surprise to me now as I meet my first morning of only six on this short stay.

Why do we not have parish churches and Sabbath bells in the thick of Salt Lake City? Well, at least beyond the Cathedral of the Madeleine. We are near enough that every now and again I can hear it. Back in our days in the Avenues Matt and I had an ongoing inquiry regarding for whom the cathedral bells toll. They are nice bells, but not Kendal on a Sunday morning bells. Perhaps the space which they must fill is just too large in such open sky. Kendal offers a nestled English scale that keeps the reverberations cozily fitted in the streets of the town.

As if the bells are not enough to keep my feet light on the walk to church along the River Kent, when they have finished we are serenaded with delightful bird song. Birds that Susie says "must just be happy to live in England." Like the cows that make such sweet cream because they live on England's "green and pleasant" hills. Maybe the earth itself keeps turning just because it is so happy to have England resting upon it.

This morning, the goodness of life is because England is here. . .and I am in it.

A Perspective in Ash

2010-04-20T16:28:00.000-07:00

Today I wish we had television; Comcast cable with 23 different news channels to surf through. It is the first time I have thought such a thing in the 4 years since we abandoned television altogether.

I'm guessing I'm not the only one who had never heard of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano before last Thursday. In fact, "hear" may be a loose term in regards to this volcano, as I have only heard one person actually try to say the name. I believe it is more commonly known as the "Icelandic Volcano".

I don't mind. American ears, much less tongues, just don't do well with that many oddly chosen consonants.

So there's the ash.

Then theres 96,000 flights canceled over the last five days.

Then there is me, sitting in front of my computer, checking BBC and CNN for updates every couple hours. My eyes sting. My pregnant body wants a soft chair. In short, I want cable news to pour over me while I lay on the couch stressing over

whether or not we will fly to Manchester England on Friday for Matthew to face the grueling ordeal of defending his doctoral dissertation.

There is a proportionate amount of uncertainty swirling about in the ethos, above our technology dependent heads, companion to those millions of tons of ash being spewed by a heretofore unknown fracture in the Earth's crust. Such dense uncertainty leads to chaos in absolutes.

Absolutely no flights.

Absolutely no way home.

Absolutely no idea in anyone's head when things will change.

All this exported from Iceland.

I liked it better when Iceland was mainly exporting woolen goods.

Had I not spent a good deal of money on plane tickets to England for dates so in danger of being terminally affected by all this, I would have the luxury of being a curious, and slightly sympathetic bystander - as I usually am - in regards to most chaos and catastrophe that comes to me by way of NPR - with variations on my level of sympathy. This time my stomach hurts and my head reels from only the potential effect awaiting me...not to mention my poor, doctoral defense bound husband.

My anxiety and "suffering" is a little bit inconsequential at this point. I am a person, in my home, with my family, enjoying a bed, not yet caught in the web over Europe. Except that web is invisibly large. When considering the domino effect of closing Heathrow Airport the web gains some visibility as a thing that consumes the world. The British Empire may have let go their purchase on many a foreign shore in the last century, but you close down London's airports and it is felt in every far corner of the earth.

Yesterday Caroline stood at my side asking questions about the video clips showing stranded people all over Europe and the UK.

"Where is the ash, Mommy? Are you and Dad going to England today? Where is your airport"

I pulled out our Great Britain Road Atlas A-Z, and showed her Manchester, and the parts of England that might be reopened soon. She flipped through the pages stopping on London.

It looks like this:

"Wow," she said, with appropriate awe. Declaring, "That's the world, kiddo."

That's Caroline calling me kiddo, not me talking to the four-year-old.

And she's got it right. London is THE World. It lies at the center of so much civilization and economy - even today.

But as I put Cecily to bed last night and said a prayer that consisted of just this phrase; "Heavenly Father, thank you for my family," I became so profoundly aware that this little house, with these five people (almost six) is MY world. England is a thing that has contributed in no small way to the development of my world. But it is here, with this family that I find I am untouched by any amount of uncertainty...or ash.

"Friends"...but not "Come-Over-for-Dinner-Friends"

2010-04-13T07:08:00.000-07:00

I have a strange relationship with Anna Quindlen.

The first strange thing about it is that she does not participate in our relationship beyond writing for a general audience. This is a somewhat passive role on her part. I don't blame her. I have never called her attention to my existence, so....

Plus, she could hardly be called passive in that writing she does for that general audience. Anna has something to say. In fact, she has many things to say, with vehemence and resolve.

My Aunt, Janice introduced me to Ms. Quindlen in 1999 with One True Thing, a novel that became popular enough to make a movie starring Renee Zellweger. It was in that book I discovered that, like Mark Helprin, Anna Quindlen was an author who would teach me new words.

I love new words.

Then I read Black and Blue.

Then I took a writing class at the Community College back in the long days of acquiring my eight year Associate's Degree. Anna Quindlen wrote an essay featured in my writing textbook in favor of abortion, given as an example of persuasive writing. I was not persuaded.

In fact, it was our first disagreement.

Which didn't amount to much as my novice pen could not begin to offer words in contradiction to one of such craft and intellect. My argument went something like this..."uh-uh" (in the negative, with my head saying "no", and my brows furrowed)...but unvocalized and without any supporting points.

Then I read Blessings.

Then I read How Reading Changed My Life.

Anna and I shared a love of reading from an early age. We even shared some of the same books, characters, magic of literature in the development of self.

But as much as I loved her words - her art, I became increasingly aware that we harbor different world views. Reading has taken us in different directions. This became more obvious when, after my first contribution to National Public Radio, I was offered a token of gratitude by receiving a subscription to NewsWeek. Anna Quindlen had an opinion column published every other week on the last page of the magazine. I read every one.

We disagreed on more than one occasion. But I couldn't give up reading her column. I wanted to know what she had to say about everything because she said it so well. If I had reason and confidence at my command, such as she does, I would write an opinion column too.

Ms. Quindlen is Catholic. Quite thoroughly so, and still practicing. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. It is impossible to discern if this creates more similarities or differences between us. We both believe in God. This is rather fundamental.

Then, in the midst of our differing faiths and world views, Elder Ballard of The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles spoke the name Anna Quindlen from the pulpit at the Conference Center during General Conference. Speaking about motherhood he quotes Quindlen speaking about her own mothering experience, saying ultimately, "I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less”

She is a generation beyond me, her children are grown, but I found that Elder Ballard's reference to Quindlen as mother created the most enduring link in our relationship thus far. Mothers - the universal sorority that eluded me entirely until I left the hospital with my first baby. Anna can argue with beguiling words in defense of all kinds of things that I work diligently in remaining unbeguiled. I still appreciate her voice.

And yesterday, when I turned the radio on to listen to the Diane Rehm Show, Diane was speaking to a woman I found a bit brash, opinionated, slightly too forward, but still likable. I get a little turned off by guests whose personalities are so commanding that they sort of "steal" Diane's authority. Diane rules.

But in the midst of speaking about whatever new book this bold woman had just published, she stopped the tide of praise in her own direction, and turned the spotlight to Diane in earnest sincerity. She announced to us listeners that our dear Diane has been recently named the recipient of the Peabody award.

It was Anna, whose voice I had never heard, but fit her perfectly in the revelation of her identity.

I would not have wanted to stand opposite her in debate club, but we stand together in our reverence for Diane. We stand together in a love of words. We stand together in a love of God, and an appreciation for motherhood. These are fundamental enough for me to consider us unthreatened friends.

Even if she doesn't know we are friends.

To Become a Person

2010-04-12T08:33:00.000-07:00

This is a reminder that there is something beautiful in me.

She is NOT me.

But I made her...partly.

Cecily is number three. She is still baby, still smiles and snuggles, and funny faces. She is 21-month-old-precociousness. Everything she does is the delight of parent who wants to feel responsible for all things good about her. But she is showing signs - signs that while she is flesh of my flesh, she is mind of her mind.

Cecily has two older siblings - four and seven. So with a few more years experience in these two, I begin to wonder how much I am truly responsible for. Children choose their behavior, but is it not formed by what they see? I am afraid to think about what they see. Because it's pretty much all me.

I don't want to take the blame for a good deal of what goes on in my children's behavior. But I want the credit for what is pretty.

There is still a lot of pretty. In all three of them. I should videotape it for happy viewing after non pretty episodes.

With Cecily....I will close my eyes and inhale slowly these last few months of baby. I will miss her, as I miss all my children at every stage. But there is such thrill in meeting them again and again in the unveiling of new character as they become the self that is, eventually, entirely independent of me.

The Happy Prospect of Things

2010-03-31T13:33:00.000-07:00

Dust yesterday.

The apocalypse of swirling dirt that filled my eyes, my lungs, my house. Without a car, I walked to to church and back with kids for something of an outing and found the wind had whipped my tresses into unyielding knots all over my head.

Snow today.

The dregs of winter pressing into my spring, leaving a single water droplet on every unopened blossom of the trees in my back garden. Oh that winter will not press so far upon us that those blossoms that would be pears, apples, and plums, will freeze in the womb of each water droplet, leaving us a fruitless summer. My August MUST drip with pear juice, the last delicacy before I bear another child.

In the snow....and in shorts, the postman brought me a passport this morning. In ten years a passport has taken me no further than England. I get on planes and fly back and forth over the vast, dark Atlantic, perfectly content with the thought that every time my passport is stamped it is on English soil. I know there are other treasures of this planet, but I feel so.....magic-wanded to have been given England, even if I am given no other geographic gifts before I die.

So I am a woman with passport in the pocket and babe in the belly - pregnant with possibility.

It is a happy future, so long as spring can hold on to its Fahrenheit tonight.

Here's Hoping

2010-03-25T19:55:00.000-07:00

I don't often solicit prayers, in my behalf, from my children. Every once in a while, after I have spoken in not-so-kind ways to them, I fall into a heap of tears and say "Let's say a prayer so Mom can be nicer." I will say a "please help me be patient and kind" sort of prayer. And Jonah will appeal the heavens, specifically The Father of the Heavens, for his Mom "to be a lot nicer, and more calm, and to forgive everyone." I cherish these pleadings for my better self to be revealed. And I believe that, just like I found the very lost book after I prayed for such a discovery, I will someday meet this better self.

I will look in the mirror, and she will be very nearly identical to me.

"Hello, better self."

"Goodbye, lesser self."

And I will bid her adieu with prayed for patience and kindness.

But Jonah's prayers have leant themselves in supplication for other good souls of late. Our little three-year-old friend, Lorelei wasn't feeling well enough to join our pre-school car pool about two weeks ago. She has been several times since, in obvious improved health, but Jonah continues to pray for her to get better every night. Having suffered the ill effects of a nasty cold since Monday, I sheepishly told Jo he was welcome to pray for me to get better after he finished praying for our healthy friend, Lorelei.

"Oh, just a second. I'll say a little one. I'm not finished."

Responding dutifully, yet lovingly to my solicitation he prayed that I would "feel better", and that I would "survive the night."

Which, has this odd way of making me feel that, beyond this pesky cold, something lurks, either within my frail body, or just outside my not-nearly-secure-enough-home that could potentially threaten my ability to "survive the night."

Silly.....I'm sure.....I think.....

But I welcome the dawn's early light as evidence of his answered prayer.

I Hope to Reconcile With Grape Juice and 7-Up

2010-03-11T09:57:00.000-08:00

I had a dream. I have heard it is a tedious thing to have dreams recounted with the expectation they might somehow entertain a person who was not in my head to get the full effect of the unreality-bizarreness of it.

I will share it anyway.

First - this disclaimer - I do not drink beer.

The dream is this:

I am apparently a university student living in a dorm/apartment with two women from my current ward; my relief society president (RSP) who is just a few years younger than me, and my newly called girls camp director who is just a few years older than me.

We are going to eat...off paper plates...on the floor....in a bedroom.

RSP brings her food in and realizes she has nothing to drink. NOTHING. A moment later, after an apparent desperate search of the apartment she comes in with one of those tall cans of Miller Light. As it turns out, I had nothing to drink either. NOTHING. So, when she abandoned a third of her can of Miller Light on the floor and went off to do other post eating things I apparently decided my thirst merited quenching with the dregs of her beer.

I drank. Deeply.

The rest of the dream is me spitting ceaselessly into a garden-size garbage can in someone's garage.

End of dream.

My experience with alcohol is limited, which is to say, I have never tasted any, in all its spectrum of backwoods-toothless-moonshine, to swirl-in-the-goblet-utter-gentility. I've smelled it, I cook with it, but never put it to the lip.

I went to a party once in Boston during my nanny days when a few young fellows insisted relentlessly that I accept the beer they were so generously offering me. After similarly relentless refusals on my part I decided to get them off my back.

University students are poor. Especially students who bring their families into multigenerational debt to attend Boston University. Supplying beer for a Friday night party is no small sacrifice.

I finally accepted the can of beer. In one motion I took the can, stuck my hand out the open window and slowly poured the entire contents down the maze of mortar between the exterior bricks of their brownstone apartment building. No one ever offered me a beer again. They didn't fancy watching their liquid gold end up on the sidewalk without ingesting it first and heaving it up later.

So why was I drinking beer in my dream?

I think it had to do with two things.

One: I drank my own version of "mixed drink" before bed that night. Matt and I both had a tall glass of grape juice and 7-Up.

Two: This is normally a favorite of mine, but I drank it on a pregnant stomach, and... I didn't puke, but my olfactory everything gets really worked over when I'm pregnant. So, what is normally a treat left me with a taste in my mouth so terrible that my brain could only process it by equating it with what I consider one of the worst smells I can imagine...beer.

This leaves the question of why my head chose my dear friend and Relief Society President as the source of the beer. Better left un-pondered, I'm sure. She is above reproach, and I will happily leave her there.

If Monica Had Not Prayed........What Then?

2010-03-06T21:18:00.000-08:00

We read.

Such is the education of one Jonah.

Among other scintillating texts this day we read from Trial and Triumph by Richard M. Hannula.

"Monica and Augustine, Christian Mother and Son."

Monica the faithful mother, Augustine the wayward son.

She prays.

He scoffs.

She prays.

He sows iniquity.

She loves.

He gets older.

She waits.

He is enlightened.

She holds her tongue.

He speaks with God.

Monica is mother.

Augustine is son.

They are brother and sister in Christ.

Repentance - the sanguinary made alabaster. Here is a fellow from some year in the fourth century after the birth of Christ. His heart was softened and his ears opened, and in an instant he was changed. No, not "was changed", as though change came at him like a bird. Change came rising up from the center of him - the very core of Augustine woven with the core of the Saviour.

Repentance = Change

This is a concept Jonah is familiar with. Not because he has had such dire need of it in his seven years, but because his Father has made sure he knows that one is the other. And because he has no end to canonical appetite. He has read of more than one sinner's path to repentance...commitment to change.

So he was taken with Augustine. Quite natural. To be expected.

We read on to discover that Augustine devoted his life to God, and teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ (such as he knew it). He even wrote a cautionary tale of sorts - St. Augustine's Confessions. You may have heard of it.

I may have heard of it too. In fact a Penguin's Classics, paperback copy of it sits on my shelf from the days of yore when I studied at University and read things meant to enlighten my Christian mind. The scholars would have me take an Augustine's Confessions and balance it in the other hand with something like a Friedrich Nietzsce's Untimely Meditations. Lest we students stray too far from secularism.

I brought the book out to show Jonah. I had him read the title, then read the sentence in the story that told of Augustine writing this book.

Jonah held the book up.

"He wrote this book? This very one? How did you get this? How did we have it already? Does Dad know we have this? We Have to read this, Mom. Dad is going to be so excited. I can't believe we have this book."

And we will....read St. Augustine's Confessions....someday. Probably not in first grade. But I'll find something in there to whet his little excitable appetite. Something to hold him over until he has had enough of the English language that fourth century translation from....Latin?...won't hurt his ears. Something to reinforce his father's declaration that repentance is change. And we can all change.

Again,

Books are beautiful.

I imagine the illustrations for such a claim will mount up, ever higher as my days on this earth pass.

I hope to take note.

And appreciate.

I'm No Princess, But I Can Eat Invisible Food

2010-02-25T14:19:00.000-08:00

I know there was a time - a pitifully far distant time - when I knew how to play make believe.

Today, this is how I pretend...

Cecily comes at me with a miniature bowl and spoon.

She shoves the spoon into my mouth,

and I say "Mmmmm" and pretend to chew whatever piece of delectable, albeit invisible food she just gave me.

The End

My kids must think I am so totally hopeless. "Mom doesn't even know how to be Princess Lea, or Queen Amadala, or Mary Lennox, or little Laura Ingles Wilder."

"Yeah," the other responds, "all she knows how to be is Mom."

Of course, even this is left in the terrible open ended question....whether or not I actually know how to be Mom, that is. But that's my own question, not theirs.

I know that playing make believe is developmental, and although I may not have moved past other parts of my child hood (like not wanting to wash the dishes), I have actually left the phase of imaginative play. I marvel at my children's ability to engage in this ongoing drama for hours.

They write the script as they go.

Jonah: "Pretend I was a prince, but you didn't know because I lived in this little cottage in the forest."

Caroline: "Pretend I couldn't breathe and I could still live because oxygen could get in through my ears."

Jonah: "And one day you found my cottage."

Caroline: "And you thought I was dead because it looked like I couldn't breathe."

Jonah: "And you found a letter in a trunk in the attic from my father that said I was a prince."

Caroline: "And we got married and our kids could breathe through their ears."

This volley of commensurate dialogue will go on ad nauseum.

In their minds they may be existing in very different imaginary universes and somehow still satiate each other's desire for recognition of the next event in the story. Jonah doesn't mind that the girl who found him in the cottage can only breathe through her ears. He doesn't need to dwell on it so long as she is willing to be in the cottage with him. Caroline sees no problem with finding the letter that reveals he is a prince so long as he says "OK" in response to her frequent and completely bizarre contributions to the plot.

But yesterday they came to me in full felicity, mentally paralleled in their game. I opened the window from my bedroom to the back yard where they were digging up my wintered garden with spades.

"Mom, mom! Look what we're doing"

"You're digging up my garden?"

"No, we're digging up Pompeii"

"Oh, what have you found so far?"

"Well, we found Noelle, and Maren, and Jenny, and Tanner, and......"

And the list goes on for some time.

In fact, if Jonah and Caroline know your name they likely found your mummified body in the Pompeii of our back yard.

Caroline is jumping up and down, giggling, rosy cheeked, holding her spade aloft. "Yeah, we dug up Tanner, Mom."

"You guys are doing a good job." I assure them. "Come in when it gets too cold."

"OK Mom, but we have A LOT more to discover first."

Books are beautiful. Books make me think things like -

There is hope for humanity.

I won't get bored while I wait an hour for my turn at the DMV.

Life can be lived without television.

Hey, my older kid can read to my younger kid while I take a fifteen minute nap.

A book taught my children about Vesuvius and Pompeii and now they can excavate my back yard, unearthing the magic of knowledge wedded to imagination.

All this during the hours they might otherwise have been down the street eating school lunch, or swinging their legs under a vandalized desk.

Not that I don't make them regularly sit at a desk. But Cecily is our only vandal, and at 19 months she hasn't mastered the art of offense.

Hello Again

2010-02-23T13:59:00.000-08:00

The interlude was cousins.

Mostly.

Cousins sleeping on every horizontal space in our house.

Cousins dressing up, and dressing up, and dressing up.

Cousins keeping the baby happy for two straight weeks.

Cousins jumping off the cabin balcony into eight feet of snow.

Cousins writing stories that will surely be published in the "What to do on a Rainy Day" Almanac.

Cousins successfully avoiding lessons after the one disastrous day of home school torture.

Cousins reincarnating Darth Vader and Co. with an Indiana Jones lego set and a bit of voo doo.

Cousins piling up in sleds and swooshing away to certain death that turns out to be just dead fun.

Cousins talking into the wee hours about building tree houses and annihilating storm troopers.

Cousins making me wonder how on earth we will survive without six kids to keep each other happy when they have waved their good byes, blown their last kisses, turned the corner at the end of the road, and left us suddenly quiet and lonely on the cold front porch.

It must mean New York is on our horizon.

The Sign of An Orderly Society

2010-01-28T18:47:00.000-08:00

- So says Wikipedia.

The Absolute Inevitable - something about "death and taxes" - so they say.

As of 7:13 this evening, I am done. I clicked submit. I e-signed. I crunched my complicated numbers. I filled in all the worksheet-this and the worksheet-that. I stapled it, filed it, and sit tapping my fingers, waiting for the refund to appear by electronic-money-magic in my bank account.

April 15th......You don't scare me.

I got you whooped on January 28th.

I know.

There is an inexhaustible list of taxations levied on "We The People."

And I know there are legitimate disputations thrown up against each one. I certainly don't want to abandon my nay-sayer compatriots in this war against taxes, but...

maybe your income tax experience is different from mine.

As in

you owe

and I don't

so you can see where we're on the verge of a little misunderstanding.

___

I am standing in front of the tiered shelves in the foyer of my local library that house many options for filing my 2009 Individual Income Tax Return. The display of forms, worksheets, instructions, and even a hotline phone number is both overwhelmingly complicated and deceptively simple. These offerings here, are just a fraction of the gazillion forms and worksheets I can access online.

What if I....

bought a Toyota Prius (new, not used)

bought any car (new, not used)

installed a geothermal water something or other

was on extended active duty outside the US, but my home is in the US

engaged in "intangible drilling"

made money fishing

housed someone displaced in a "Midwestern disaster?"

If I did any of those things then I ought to be spanked - that's what. Because it may mean money back, or it may mean money owed, but it definitely means lots of confusing "Schedule A's or B's and forms 8814, and 4972.

It requires deciphering the instructions that say:

1. Subtract line 4 from line 3
2. Multiply $2,433 by the total number of exemptions claimed on Form 1040, line 6d.
Enter the result here and on Form 1040, line 42.
3. Divide line 5 by $2500
4. Multiply line 6 by 2% (.02) and enter the result as a decimal
5. Multiply line 2 by line 7
6. Divide line 8 by 3.0

7. Multiply the number of times you just said #%@!, by 843

8. Divide by the number of children asking for food while you figure incalculable calculations

9. Get a babysitter

10. Drive to the nearest State Liquor Store

11. Pay big time "sin-taxes" on the 40 oz bottle of Absolut Vodka that you are about to drink

whether you are into alcohol or not

12. Write the word "NO" on line 75

13. Put a load of stamps on it and hope for the best.

Anyway...

All this is still ahead of me while I'm standing there in the library lamenting the days when the 1040EZ had my name on it.

A man walks behind me and says:

"Don't do it. Obama will just spend it."

I pretend he isn't talking to me. I don't turn around, I don't even give the little social-graces-friendly-neighbor chuckle to communicate our shared misery in the paying of taxes. I let him walk past wondering to himself if I had heard him trying to be funny.

I want to make something VERY clear before I proceed-

I HAVE NOTHING POLITICAL TO SAY

ever about, anything

(Unless your name is Matt, and I am married to you. Then I might say something now and again that could be construed as having a political opinion).

That said, I continue.

I should have a placard pinned to my back that reads:

Taxes: a sum of money demanded by a government for its support or for specific facilities or services, levied upon incomes, property, sales, etc.

Whether you are Mr. Obama, Mr. Bush, Mr. Lincoln, or Mr. Reagan the point of taxes is to spend them. And no matter who the Commander in Chief is, there are a fair number of cosigners on any check sent out by the Federal government.

There have been publicans aplenty throughout more nations than ours, gathering up the taxes since well before the Anno Domini era began. We've been relinquishing our last coins to the publicans, whether they be Re-publicans or Obama-publicans for millennia. And the Romans still have little bits of road all throughout Britain to show for it.

I thank my tax dollars (and my habitual late fees) nearly every day for the library I am now standing in.

There are some reasons to feel good about contributing.

p.s. Mr. Man at the library, if I don't file, I don't get all that money back that will surely pay for a dishwasher.

Maybe someday, when all my "Exemptions" have moved away to start families of their own, I will feel less inclined to file.

Until then -

Render unto Obama what is Obama's, or...

buy a "stove that burns biomass fuel to heat your home" and get a whopping refund for being so "green."

I Am Not Beyond Coveting

2010-01-22T10:21:00.000-08:00

I'm a little bugged.

The Parent Trap has never offended me before, but yesterday....well...you'll see.

Apologies to Katie for still having her copy of The Parent Trap. But I am pleased my kids are watching the original now and not the Lindsey Lohan version.

Kids are sick. Sick is rubbish. Rubbish deserves time on the couch watching movies. Which they have done a good deal of this week. I sat down at the tale end of Parent Trap yesterday, just in time to catch the kissing scene.

Good grief.

There they are; Maureen O'hara and Brian Keith kissing in the middle of his California Ranch-House kitchen.

And right there, in plain sight, for everyone to see -

IS A DISHWASHER !

It's clearly visible - just beyond Ms. O'hara's tidy little derriere .

As you can imagine, this was upsetting for me.

What year was this filmed?

I'll tell you what year: 1961

That's What Year.

Mmmm Hmmm.

What year is it now?

I'll tell you what year: 2010

According to Arthur C. Clarke we would be travelling and inhabiting space like it was a trip to Nebraska by 2010. Jupiter would turn into a star and we would colonize Europa...or Io...or some such satellite of Father Zeus.

You may have noticed we are not colonizing a moon of Jupiter.

But the real tragedy, to which I would like to draw your attention is this:

I HAVE NO DISHWASHER !

In the year 2010 I am still washing my nasty, grimy dishes by hand. And a few months ago when our water heater went out, I boiled water on the stove to wash those dishes by hand.

So...at least I have an in-door stove, which isn't even wood burning.

I'm like - way modern with my gas stove.

A dishwasher in 1961?

Hmph.

Was that really necessary for the Susan/Sharon switch-a-roo narrative?

The set designers of this 1961 film might have thought ahead a little so as to spare the feelings of us "have-nots" in the year 2010.

What Persephone Couldn't Resist

2010-01-15T09:20:00.000-08:00

That's a Good Day

Thank You Marba Rose

Thank You Nita Sue

Thank you Celeste Thank you Susie

A long time ago, I had a Grandma.

Marba Rose.

"Grandma," I would say, "I'm hungry.

"What do you want for lunch?" she would ask in this very sincere way, as if she ever expected me to eat anything other than a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

"Peanut butter and jelly."

As if there existed any other edible anything when it comes to lunch.

She would make a sandwich like this:

Two slices of Shepherd's Bread from the Von's on the corner of Lamb and Charleston in unincorporated Las Vegas, Nevada.

Jiff peanut butter spread so thick on one slice you could lose a marble in it.

Margarine on the other side, but only a bit and only to accentuate what came next-

Le Piece de Resistance

Homemade, from homegrown, pure magenta, sweet-tart a la perfection in a Kerr jar

Pomegranate Jelly.

Slice that bad boy in two, serve with a well chilled glass of 2% milk and feel it stick to the roof of your mouth in pure ecstasy.

Plus, my grandma was a genius and knew pretty much everything, like how to love my Dad and his brother through the teenage years.

And other important things like-

"A glass of milk with a peanut butter sandwich provides all eight of the essential amino acids."

I still don't know what an amino acid is, but my Grandma sure made me feel good about eating my daily peanut butter and jelly.

___

I have a Mom.

Nita Sue

She lives in the house my Grandma lived in all the years I was growing up. She tends the pomegranate trees planted by my Grandpa way back when. She harvests the leather-skinned fruit. She juices the impossible seeds. And every time she comes to visit me she brings quart jars full of the sweet nectar for me to make into jelly.

She taught me to make the jelly.

___

I have a friend.

Celeste

She taught me to make bread.

Not just any bread - the delicious kind, that people fawn over, including myself. The kind we have to ration so as not to eat all three heavenly loaves that just came out of the oven, before Matt gets home to enjoy a slice.

___

I have a Mother-in-law

Susie

Dear Susie

She taught me there is more to life than peanut butter and jelly.

And because I lived in her house for two years and cooked elbow to elbow at her stove, following VERY precise directions all along the way, and because she works culinary magic with any morsel of food that makes its way into her kitchen (including.....onions...) I can now whip up a little dish that makes me feel so gourmet...so sophisticated. Like I should have a bit of lemon sorbet before I eat it to cleanse my palette of all the ordinary things that passed by there throughout the day.

This is it - Carrot and Onion Soup

A bit of butter, a bit of chicken stock, a bit of cream

A whole lot of sauteed carrots and onions

Blend

Savor

And think your life blessed that you

Peanut buttered and jellied for lunch

with your own homemade pomegranate perfection

and your own "pain du jour"

and you grew up for dinner

eating onions in ANY form that would have once been worse than eating dirt

and is now better than eating candy

If the peanut butter and milk provide the eight essential amino acids, the carrots and onions must provide the for-the-pure-joy-of-it amino acids.

I love women.

We hand things down in a way that the men generally only appreciate at the table,

and that we appreciate in the soul.

Bless you women.

And ain't magenta pretty?

Two Truths

2010-01-13T10:16:00.000-08:00

I deal with lots of poop.

I exist in a state of frantically avoiding being late...while still being...well, late.

Recipe for Disaster

1 - Pour both distasteful ingredients into my morning

2 - Pinch nose to avoid the stink

3 - Avoid buying a watch for 15 months

4 - Pretend you can get eight hours of stuff done in two hours...with a toddler on your hip

Then Bake

or Freeze, as one is more prone to do on a morning in January.

Caroline had preschool at 10:30, which is precisely what time I was changing Cecily's rather offensive morning diaper. We still had to pick up our carpooling friend.

I was the proverbial headless chicken.

I might have yelled at the kids to "Get in the car! RIGHT NOW!"

And if I did, I likely apologized in very solicitous tones from the front seat, while eyeing them in the rear-view mirror.

To which Jonah likely replied "Thanks Mom. Turn the book-on-CD back on please."

So if I yelled, they must have recovered.

We got the girls to school.

I took Jonah and Cecily to the library where I have been wielding Jonah for the past few weeks.

I have an itty-bitty problem with late fees at the library. And after a particularly disastrous affair with a stack of DVD's that escaped my to-do list, I had amassed fines well into the double digits. The city library rather generously allows children to "read down" their fines: $1 for every twenty minutes or $6 for every hour. This is not a privilege offered adults. But my children are allowed to read down my fines. So far Jonah has done three hours and twenty minutes at our library. We're still in the red, but he's saved me $16 so far.

I owe him.

Or maybe it can be considered payment for countless hours of my lost sleep in his infancy.

We went to play group at the church after reading time at the library. From there I had to pick up the girls from school. I intended to leave Jo and Cecily in the hands of other capable mothers while I fetched Caroline. At ten minutes to 1:00pm (which is when I was meant to be at the school whisking Caroline into the car) I noticed Cecily was not smelling right, and her pants were wet.

Blast the ineffective diaper!

I laid her on the floor to execute a quick change.

Five minutes and counting...

I WILL NOT BE LATE.

Unbutton the pants to reveal....

OH NO

How could this be?

Blast the ineffective mother!

The child had NO diaper on.

While acting the part of the headless chicken two and a half hours earlier I neglected to re-diaper my child.

She was soaked through with pee.

One pant leg full of poop.

Smile on her face.

She could have at least cried to tip me off.

It took more than five minutes to scrub her down in the bathroom.

I was late.

Caroline's pre-school teacher was very understanding.

The offending pants are on the front porch this morning, because the offending mother was more likely to soak them with gasoline and light a match than scrub them at the end of her frantic day.

I'll wait to deal with it until after I've had a piece of the bread I just took out of the oven.

My only proof (just now) that sometimes I can do some things right.

For Naomi - On Her Birthday

2010-01-06T12:30:00.000-08:00

Poet?

NO.

I am no poet.

Alas, I hereby beg the pardon of you who write poetry; my Dad, and Chani.

And you who read it with an ear for letting it "live in you"; my Dad and Chani...and most of the rest of us.

I beg this pardon for the poem I intend to share.

Which I share

Only because Aubrey wrote so beautifully this morning about her first daughter who turned 12 yesterday. Who is a lady in every respect.

She blooms.

Oh, how this little girl blooms.

Aubrey speaks of a photograph I took in 1997. This image I captured on 35mm, black and white, Ilford film that had been purchased in a large roll that was manually wound up into a used film canister in a dark closet so as not to expose it prematurely to light. I clicked with a fully metal, fully manual Nikon F3HP.

Those were the days before omni-digital.

I set the shutter speed.

I set the aperture.

I set the moment of our realization of the possibility of Naomi, in stone.

___

I took that picture when you, Naomi, were the spark of life itself.

Dividing...

and dividing...

and dividing asunder...

the philosophies of man that would have me believe that the hand of God played no part in the orchestration of you.

But He did.

___

Then I wrote a poem.

Which I do sometimes...shrouded in the pages of journals rarely opened by hands other than my own.

I prefer prose -the blessed meadow with no barbed wire, strong-arming me into submission.

Prose is...eating chocolate chip cookies and milk in my pajamas and slippers.

Poetry is...singing "Both Sides Now" on karaoke in front of Joni.

One is less comfortable than the other.

If the the photo were taken in the age of digital, I would place it here to couple it with this poem. If it were taken in the age of digital it would be a more beautiful photo with with two clicks of my mouse. Instead it is a black and white rendering of my mother braiding my sister, Aubrey's hair while sitting at the table in the kitchen of the home we grew up in. It is slightly over exposed and lacks the contrast Picasa grants me regularly on the photos I take now...in the age of digital.

Aubrey was sick to her stomach that morning.

My Mother has NEVER missed an opportunity to inquire about,

wonder about,

dream about,

pray about,

welcome with the most brilliant joy,

the possibility

of a grandchild.

While her hands were full of Aubrey's hair, my Mom asked, "Could you be...?"

"Yes, I could be."

"Are you?"

"I don't know."

She was.

It felt like a secret joy when I learned my sister was going to have a baby. I liked it...a lot. She called me in England to tell me when Naomi was born. I was a missionary. I wept over my absence. I wept over Naomi's presence.

I wrote this poem while Aubrey was still expecting Naomi, and sent a copy to her and my Mom along with the framed photo for Christmas.

It isn't titled. Only dated: "Started Oct 97"

Those fingers have woven my hair and hers

Over and under, they swift become lures

Pulling us in for the wiping of tears

Letting us go with the coming of years

Motherhood spills from her heart and her hands

Into her daughter, now waiting she plans

For in your days of youth and mirth

to blessed daughters you have both given birth

I see you both now as women and friends

Yet childhood visions my memory lends

Blonde hair and blue eyes, bare feet and bare knees

We conquered backyards, sailed living room seas

Now you are mothers, I wait for my turn

Unsure of my future, of what I must learn

Yet like a child, I often am scared

Ever I'm worried I'll not be prepared

We have all three been student and teacher

Taken our turn as listener and preacher

Your mothering sermons fall not on deaf ears

You are gently, with love, allaying my fears

___

Twelve years on I have joined them in the bearing of children. Joined them three times over. I have wept the bitterest tears over my greatest despairs to these two women. My fear of those dark days when I am truly unfit to be a mother. They pick me up every time, casting out the notion that there is any other path equal to this one.

There is a line of mothers behind me, the women who have each borne Eve's pain until I am here to bear it myself. The true pain of motherhood comes after our bodies are broken by the entrance of life. And were it not for my sororal progenitors, namely the one I call Mom, and those truly sister to me, the pain of motherhood would break my soul. But they keep me whole. And with them, I learn that in light of Lehi's opposites, this pain is merely the footpath to life's most profound joys.

And I can't make that rhyme.

So I'm sticking with prose.

When You Don't Have the Right Keys

2009-12-30T16:52:00.000-08:00

The whole incident was about four and a half minutes.

There were tears.

No blood.

But many tears.

Can a mother who really does want to keep her children admit to turning her back on her 17-month-old for....mmmm...20 seconds? Or is there state intervention after 19 seconds? If "The State" should be monitoring presently, we'll say it was no more than 19 seconds. Certainly not crossing the line into negligent, but long enough to produce adrenaline when my back was no longer turned.

It was snowing. I had three kids with me, lots of bags, boxes, folders, and keys. I was juggling everything in an effort to unlock the south west door of the church even though I wanted to be in the south east corner. But my key only opens one door. I parked in a handicap spot not wanting to use a sled to schlep everything through sodden snow on my way to the door.

We managed to make our way inside, going from completely frozen to intolerably hot. Regardless of how often I push buttons on the thermostat in this room it holds itself in the "Perpetual Tropics" region of 80 generous degrees Fahrenheit. After opening windows I laid out bagels and cream cheese as brazen means of bribing teenage girls into doing my bidding for the next hour. There is no shame here. Teenagers require lots of food, and lots of bribing. I am not above this tawdry exchange. Neither are they.

I saw a red-coated man in the hall, but there are often miscellaneous people at the church in the middle of the day, in the middle of the week. He had keys, which immediately placed him as legitimate in my mind, despite having never seen his face in my five years patronizing this church. While opening a locked door on one side of the room for an early comer, my little Cecily was heading out another door...towards the red-coated man.

After the 19 seconds discussed previously, I became aware that Cecily was no longer in the room and not visible down the long hallway before me. Just as I caught a glimpse of the red-coated man turning the corner at the end of that hallway, I heard Cecily scream.

For half a second I imagined Cecily, held tight under the deceptive warmth of the red coat, going away from me with a face I had never seen before and might never see again.

She screamed again.

The sound was too close for her to be hidden under a coat on the other side of the building. But I couldn't see her....anywhere.

Then she was crying long frantic sobs that came, unmistakably, from behind the library door, held fast with two heavy bolts, for which there were no keys on my ring.

"HEY!" I yelled. "HEY!", because I didn't have a name to go with my desperate call to the red-coated man. I bolted down the hall, leaving Jonah and Caroline to console the terrified Cecily trapped in complete darkness behind two inches of solid wood. I rounded the corner with still no glimpse of red. My heart can handle only so much adrenaline before it pounds itself into cardiac arrest. Who will have a key? How long will it take them to get here? How high up is the handle of the long blade of the paper cutter on the counter just to the left of the library door?

She was wailing, and I was flailing, and we were both of us frightened beyond measure.

There he was! The red-coated man bumbling about in a cleaning closet.

"Sir...my daughter...the door...back there...it's locked...no key...can you...please?"

I was catching my breath, having wasted it on the horrific possibility that Cecily had been whisked away under the red coat.

The same coat worn by the gentle man that smiled in front of me. "Oh sure," he said. "I thought you had closed the door to keep her out. She must have been pretty quiet. I didn't even know she was in there."

Ok, well, let's hope he didn't know she was in there, because the alternative is a little perverse.

He rescued her with absolutely zero level of urgency in either his voice or movement. A father who had apparently dealt with this sort of thing before with the realization that a child behind a closed door comes out fairly unscathed. I'm sure I was sufficiently scathed for everyone present.

The red-coated man turned back the bolt on both locks and swung the door wide. Cecily stood there in the dark holding her milk cup in one hand, her face soaked by great watery tears and mucus. She was instantly quieted at the sight of all of us crowded round the open door. I scooped her up, expecting the consolation to be long and painful, but she was done crying. No fretting, no scarring--just a "get me the heck out of here, if you please" and she was off to play with the other little ones that had joined us by then.

Later, after all the girls had arrived and they were salivating over Jackie's coffee cake, I told them we could start after I moved my car form the handicap spot. Someone suggested that, as a mother, I might be entitled to a handicap spot.

Yep.

Handicapped by three kids and no eyes in the back of my head, as it seems all the other moms get.

What We Do Before the Cock Crows

2009-12-22T20:08:00.000-08:00

Aside from his first months of life when Jonah seemed sustained not by mother's milk, but crying beyond the realms of colic, he has been a good and peaceful sleeper. At least until 6am, when his inner clock gives him a good 'thwack' from the inside, jolting him out of sleepy reverie and physically out of bed. He gets this jolt based entirely on the time and not the number of hours he has slept. Put him to bed at 7:30 with a story and a hug and he is up at six. Put him to bed at 10:30 with a "get your hiney into bed or I'll get it there for you," and he is up at six.

This schedule works for all of us because Matt gets up early and the two of them commune in the wee hours while we of the fairer sex rest on, attending to our beauty. Father and son might commune like this: Matt gets into the shower while Jonah lays on the hard tile of the bathroom floor soaking up the heat from the vent. Father and son might instead commune like this: Matt pours a bowl of cereal for each of them and they sit at the table together considering the confections they will eat when Dad finishes his 'book' and we have a mighty junk-food-party. And yet another means of communion might play out as such: Matt goes back and forth from bathroom to closet dressing and grooming, gelling hair, brushing teeth, and tying shoes while Jonah follows almost a full step behind chattering ceaselessly about Willie Scott, Short Round and Indiana Jones, making Matt wish we had 5000 more square feet in our home so as to avoid tripping over his son every time he turns around.

I give this quality time to my boys each morning as a gift of the truest motherly love. I stay in my warm bed and let them enjoy the half-light without my influence so that Jonah will have these memories with his Dad forever. It is a gift I am possibly a little too happy to give. So, on mornings when Matt is not around to absorb the impact of Jonah's wakefulness I tend to struggle just a little bit. Mother and son might commune like this: Jonah comes to the side of my bed where I am effectively 'dead to the world.' "Mom," he says with a voice that has the raspiness of a shameful effort at whispering and the volume of a freight train. "Can I have some cereal?" Why would he ask this of me? Do we not grant him the right of eating cereal every day of his life? "Yes, you can get your own cereal. And then go read a book and let me sleep, Jo."

Our communion comes in other ways, at more decent hours throughout the day. My best self emerges with the sun.

While in Las Vegas for two weeks I began to tire of Jonah's sweet company in the dark of early morning. I went to bed too late and I wanted him to go away and let my body eek its selfish sleep in a heavily curtained room. One night (late, I'm sure) as my Mom and I sat at the table talking about going to bed, she mentioned how it might be nice if Jonah would get up in the morning and start his lessons on his own. This was a stroke of maternal genius that I had not gleaned from my own paltry experience as a mothering neophyte.

"That's it! I'll make a treasure hunt for him to follow in the morning when he gets up." This I did with all of the gusto that a person has left at 1:00 in the morning after a day of keeping three children alive and one adult sane. I used 3x5 cards strategically placed throughout the house to get the most mileage out of the activity. It started with a large sign on my bedroom door that said "DO NOT ENTER" and then some clue that led him far away from my bedside, out of ear shot. I gave Jonah several activities with which to amuse himself including his writing/copywork, and reading three or four chapters of his Magic Tree House book. At the end of all this I had Charlotte's Web queued up in the DVD player so he could push 'power' and 'play', giving me an extra two hours of sleep, giving him a more present and capable mother.

Jonah bought this whole thing like it was a trip to Legoland. He woke up, he came to my room with his freight-train-whisper on the tip of his tongue and found the clue on my door. He followed each direction, reading and writing on his own without any one there to nag him like his teacher might have considered absolutely necessary before then. He moved on to the getting-his -own-breakfast part, and finally to watching Charlotte's Web before he decided he had to wake someone up.

Jonah knocked on my bedroom door with no thought to waking the baby that slept in the room with me. I jumped out of bed lamenting the unsuccessful attempt at the morning treasure hunt. It felt far too early for him to have taken the bait. He stood before me in tears.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "Did you do the treasure hunt?"

"Yes," he sniffled. "I did all of it. But I'm too lonely. No one is waking up."

I pushed the button on the clock to illuminate the hour.

5:00 AM!

Jonah had eaten, copied a full page of writing , read four chapters , and watched an entire movie, and it was 5:00 in the morning. Maybe he and Matt have been communing earlier than I thought.

Driving North --- For a Really Long Time

2009-12-18T20:31:00.000-08:00

Part I - Backing Out of the Driveway

There are four hundred miles and many hours ahead of us this day.

While I'm closing my door, before I put the car in reverse, it starts.

Jonah: "Mom, put the Penderwicks on."

Me: "Just a minute Jo. We're going to get gas first, and then I'll turn it on."

We reach the stop sign fifty feet from the driveway.

Jonah: "MOM, put the book on tape on. Please."

Me: "Jonah, wait."

Pulling into the gas station:

Jonah:"Mom, why can't you just turn it on so we can listen while you get gas?"

Me: "Look kid, you will have seven hours to enjoy Penderwick adventures, and I want to listen too. So cut it out, and have a little patience."

I love books on tape/cd/mp3. This conversation would have sent me into shrill guilt-ridden shrieks if it had been about the DVD player. But we opted for the Toyota Sienna without a DVD player...and not because of the money.

Thanks for paving the audio-way, Aubrey.

Despite giving Jonah and Caroline both a dose of dramamine, Jonah is wide-eyed for two hours while we listen. Caroline is asleep before we leave the gas station.

Part II. Car Dancing With The Black Eyed Peas

The desert can be beautiful. The desert can be monotonous. Coming through the gorge onto the Utah side I feel the signs of driver's fatigue and know that the sonorous voice of our narrator is going to put me to sleep even if the Penderwick girls are plotting grievous, sinful, provocative encounters.

Break out the mp3 and -

Give me a little "Let's Get it Started" by The Black Eyed Peas...with some volume.

And maybe a 16oz Coke - for purely medicinal purposes which I employ only when travelling and revel in under those circumstances alone. Shhh.

In the rear view mirror I see that after turning off the book Jonah is instantly asleep while Caroline is now awake and dancing with reckless abandon.

Part III. Can We Just Get Rid of Beaver?

You may not feel this way. I'm sorry if you have fond feelings for Beaver and I might step all over those feelings. But....

Beaver is Utah's black hole. I don't know why. I am not armed with terrible stories to justify such a claim. It's just not right. And I don't really believe that anybody actually lives there anyway. Sulpherdale residents man the Beaver gas stations to maintain the facade of township.

The only good thing that ever happened in Beaver was our family lying on the grass of the football field over at the abandoned high school and two-year-old Caroline says "I see the moon." It took us a LONG time to spot, but she was right - a little, faint sliver of moon was up there - staring at us.

When we left Vegas we didn't even need jackets.

We met winter in Beaver. It hung low in the air under gray clouds and a dirty haze. It felt sad and cold. I added a few more notches of speed to the cruise control.

Part IV. If You're Going to Yell, Don't do it in Public

I wanted to take four-year-old Quentin and strap him into a seatbelt in my van and take him home with me. Thirty minutes at the Burger King in Fillmore convinced me that home life with Chris-the-Dad-angry-face-yelling-man is no trip to Disneyland. While Quentin's parents alternately yelled at him and ignored him we got to know him. He's a good kid. He would have gotten in my car and gone home with me. I smiled at him and made him laugh...so, it was kind of underhanded not-so-fair-play on my part.

While we are on the subject of yelling,

Glenn Beck

is not invited to participate in my life.

In ANY way.

So all you gas stations out there or fast food places (like, say, the Burger King in Fillmore) - TURN IT OFF!!

Or put Discovery Channel on, Food Network, HSN, QVC, TLC, AMC, SYFY, ANYTHING.

Please.

Part V. Coming Home a New Soul

It's dark now, and although we enjoyed blue skies when we were sufficiently clear of Beaver, Northern Utah offers us a good deal of stop and go traffic that kind of bites. There's nothing like traveling 350 miles in five hours only to spend another two on the last fifty miles.

The kids are finally starting to ask when we will be home.

"Soon." I say and hope simultaneously. "See those lights coming at us in a big curve? Those are cars coming around the point of the mountain. Salt Lake is on the other side of that curve."

While we come around the point Yael Naim is declaring herself "A New Soul."

I feel like a new soul too.

Surviving a heart attack and open heart surgery with my Dad has been an altering experience this past week.

I am reforged of new stuff - mostly because he is reforged, coming out of the fire with no beard and new intentions.

My Mom and Dad will have to keep that fire lit together. I will offer what fuel I can as often as possible.

I love you both, even while driving away from you.

"Now Join Your Hands, and With Your Hands Your Hearts" --William Shakespeare

2009-12-14T11:08:00.000-08:00

My brother's wife is pregnant. The baby is a girl. The girl has a heart, and this little heart has somewhere on it an "abnormality."

"Down syndrome" they are whispering. It could be...but there are tests, and then there is waiting.

My big sister has a heart. She thought she left it four states away yearning for friends and home seven years in the making. Sometimes she thinks her heart got left a whole country away. Out there past plains and rivers that cut down the middle, through forests and deserts, over the Rockies, just hibernating, waiting.

My little sister wed her heart to someone else who left it by text message slumped on the floor in the hall pumping anguish just as readily as it pumped joy a year before.

My Mom has a....well...the biggest heart you ever done saw. I think her heart makes her tears. It makes lots of them. Reserves from which she dips for every happy thought, every sympathy, every bout of consuming laughter, every hurt, every passion, every moment with the divine. I don't know that she lives a single day without dipping into that pool.

This week her reserves are dangerously low from excessive use.

My Dad has a heart. On Tuesday it betrayed him.

Or, rather, he has been betraying it for too many years now.

While I put my children to bed in an otherwise empty house his veins were refusing access to his heart. Well, we know what to do with veins like that. We bypass them...if we are surgeons, if we wear gloves and know how to open chests, and make microscopic stitches.

I have a heart too.

I'm not sure about mine.

It could break under the right conditions, which I would likely label the "wrong conditions" were they to occur. But that's just it - nothing is breaking my heart. I feel the fast and fluttering empathetic beats that come with troubling news, but I am still whole, still...happy...mostly.

These are hearts made alive by mingled blood, flesh of my flesh. They are as surely and intricately connected to one another as they are to the veins that are wound about each one delivering life.

Miracles are the stuff behind seeing my Dad and my Dad seeing me yesterday. Grace is the approbation for questionable words that might not leave his mouth on better days.

"Oh please...let me go home," is his invocation to all the life that comes after this, the life that would not have been his without a bit of sacred serendipity.

All our hearts break, and all our hearts heal.

My brother and his wife have no less love in their hearts for a child with down syndrome. My big sister was smiling today as she talked about the life she builds next door to the Sacred Grove. My little sister loves with, and is loved by a better heart than she has known before. My Mother ate cookies with me by the fire last night, her heart making new tears to cry over happier things, and my Dad...

...my Dad beckons me to come close enough to hear a dry, slurred whisper, "Jesse, help me. You've got to bring me a knife. I've gotta cut these things off."

Yes, his hands are tied down because they are connected to arms that might be better described as sledge hammers, which are in turn connected to an oddly functioning brain at present. In short, he can pack a mighty punch, of which nobody wishes to be the recipient.

But the knife bit tells me he's on the mend. He's really stretching to gather his wits about him...such as they are.

Oh, alright, Dad. You've got pretty impressive wits. And you may brandish them at will in no time.

Prescience...or Sophomoric Communion?

2009-12-08T00:05:00.000-08:00

Caroline seems to be waxing all kinds of lyrical at bed time these days.

Last night she uttered this plea in Matthew's behalf,

"Dear Heavenly Father, please bless the Holy Spirit to save Dad from all those gross bugs."

What I want to know is, has she seen something in my house that I have not. We run into the occasional uninvited spider, I may have seen a Box Elder bug...or two, but what's up with "all those gross bugs?" Is Caroline having nocturnal encounters with insects that would give her cause to pray for Matt's welfare?

I didn't question her about the content of her prayer. I mostly just give silent thanks when she decides she is willing to pray.

But I considered sending a few more details heavenward, like; "maybe You could work out some kind of insect-impregnable forcefield around Matt while he sleeps tonight."

There is the terrible prospect that the "gross bugs" she's talking about are.....(it's hard for me to even type the word)...ear wigs!*@!

Oh no, please don't be earwigs. Such an invasion cannot be borne.

But Matt called me today and he seems well enough so either the insect-impregnable forcefield is working out alright, or Caroline is four, and says strange four-year-old things that harbor merit primarily in their humor.

A bit of "Not-Lonely" Please

2009-12-04T23:23:00.000-08:00

We are a migratory clan, 400 long miles from the man who is "Dad" in our tribe.

It is bedtime - a torturous routine involving three children that always, every night, despite any efforts on anyone's part, end up asleep. I can't get them there fast enough. They would prop their eyelids open with toothpicks and ask for seventy-two "goodnight drinks" to avoid the inevitable slumber.

Jonah is letting slip a few I-miss-Dad tears as we go through our third round of hugs in the dark room. He decides a prayer will help. "Please bless Dad that he won't be lonely," Jo implores on Matthew's behalf.

One "amen" later Caroline refutes the prayer.

"Dad doesn't be lonely, Jonah. He be's with the Holy Ghost."

(The apostrophe in "be's" is poetic license based on my assumption that Caroline has created a contraction out of "be is". Thus - he be's...)

Well, I for one am feeling better about the state of my husband's potential loneliness. Lest I fear that a man alone at home misses his family, I need only remind myself that "he be's with the Holy Ghost."

And Jonah's tears are gone, so apparently the Holy Ghost be's with us too.

The Cat We Never Owned

2009-11-24T19:32:00.000-08:00

This morning she brought me a bird. This night she is a cat from my past, curled up at the end of somebody's bed, in somebody's house, but not my bed and not my house.

It turns out Moxie's real name is Cuddles.

Cuddles...?

Moxie came to us in August when I thought our world was falling apart because I couldn't for the life of me figure out if schooling our children at home was truly the best thing for our family. Which indecision led to severe anxiety, which led to working over my six year old son to the point that he developed a head and facial tic, which caused me instant and terrible panic/guilt.

And here comes this gray cat covered in dirt from my back garden where she has been rolling around for two weeks under cover of six foot tomato plants, until we finally noticed that she never went home. It took me two weeks to consider that she might be thirsty, two weeks to hold the door open for her on purpose. It took me no time at all to see that she was THIRSTY, and no time at all to see that an open door led to an open heart.

The day I gave her water I called Matt to ask him to bring home cat food as well. I made this request to a man that has never, in his whole life, owned a cat or admitted anything resembling the slightest affection for the species.

He came home with cat food.

We gave it to her in a red cereal bowl from the cupboard. In the morning she put a dead mouse in the same bowl.
If it hadn't been for the dead mouse, I might not have ever loved Moxie. We might not have given her a name. We might not have bought the second bag of food when the first ran out. We might not have let her sleep at the end of the bed. We might not have taken her to the vet to make sure she was fixed.

She was fixed.

Moxie was also microchipped. This is new to my domestic-pet-lexicon. When I was a kid and we had a cat, and a cat, and a cat, we were responsible owners because our cats always had a collar with a tag. Evidently a collar is now retro. Animals have microchips hidden under some mysterious layer of skin with all this information on it about how I am not the real owner, but they are out there...somewhere...or, no...out there at this address and this phone number waiting to come take the cat back. Microchippers who expect the rest of the world to know this is the 21st century means of animal identification. Microchippers who are happy to come to my house at 4:00 and pry the cat from the bosom of my family.

Does this sound dramatic?

Yesterday I would not have thought I could shed so many tears over a cat.
This morning as Moxie curled up on my bed under my chin, licking my hand and purring lustily, I had a strange premonition that she would not be there tomorrow morning. I dismissed it, and entered a day of ridiculous devastation. My face is swollen and my eyes burn from all my crying.

They say animals can assume their owners' maladies. So, maybe I get a cold and by some strange, string-theory phenomenon, my cat steals it from me, expelling great, altruistic sneezes that leave me fit as a fiddle. Remember Jonah's tic.....well....Moxie did not develop a tic. She entered our life in customary feline fashion, locating a throne and perching regally within our household. Regal though she was, her reign was fraught with tender ardor. Moxie came as leg rubber, foot snuggler, lap layer, bed sleeper, hand nudger, purr box extraordinaire. All this she laid at the foot of Jonah's troubled moment. She didn't develop a tic, but as she loved my little boy, he undeveloped his.

Who is to say this cat did not know that when she got to our front door after wandering a mile from the door that fed her, she knew we were aching inside, and that she had something to offer? There were plenty of doors before ours.

She was a stray, and as such I eventually had to make sure that her growing belly was a return to health and not a brood of little, stray kittens. This is what landed her in the vet's office, under a gun that reveals the bar code of true ownership.

This is when Moxie became Cuddles. On principle the people at the Vet's office immediately dismissed the name we had given the cat we took in off the street. Cuddles has a family, or at least she has a woman. A woman of some years who was eager to reclaim her property.

My telephone conversation with Cat Woman was brief and tearful, and I made sure to mention that my three young children would like time to say goodbye to their cat. She made sure to bring her grandchildren to my door for the reclamation. "See," Cat Woman is saying, "I have children too, staking equal emotional claim on this animal." She scoots the disinterested children into my home, wielding them like pawns in this unorthodox exchange. Jonah had no qualms declaring his opinion that the cat "likes us better." Cat Woman didn't miss a beat in denouncing this opinion. I stood in the corner absurdly blinking away tears as though I should become uncharacteristically stoic to spare the feelings of Cat Woman and her mute phalanx.

But truth was on her side. Moxie had a microchip because Cat Woman loved her enough to put it there. I knew what was right...and inescapable. My pain does not inherently vilify her.

___

A few days on now, and we are doing well.

I am glad we discovered we can be "cat people", and perhaps we will be again someday.
But this cat....she was a bit on the perfect side.

I agree with my sister's boyfriend who says:

I like Moxie's moxie.

But, in the end, I have to admit that just as much, or maybe even more,

I like Cuddles' cuddles.

"Holy Crud ----- The Toothless Man"

2009-11-14T13:39:00.000-08:00

I AM THE TOOTH FAIRY

Don't let this confuse you. I know. You are also the tooth fairy.
It's one of those universal titles. Like when you are walking around in the grocery store and there are little people everywhere saying "Mom", and they are not your children, and it grows ever more confusing that you are just one of many millions of women with the same name. So it is with "tooth fairy". Except in this scenario you are just one of many millions of women (or men) who are complicit in the harmless charade that there is that one, solitary fairy, flitting about from bed to bed collecting little dead bits of our children's bodies that fall out of their heads.

Jonah is "at that age". The age when little dead bits of his body fall out of his head. He's lost four now, and I'm growing less mournful at the loss of his "milk teeth." His mouth is moving and spreading in the strangest of ways, giving me no choice but to hope for a better world. A better world being one wherein Jonah's mouth does not resemble that of a 50 year old English, drunkard. At present he is leaning in that direction.

Two days this week have ended in a stealthy transaction in Jonah's room. I slip four quarters into his tooth-pillow while removing the small mark of his childhood. I'll not admit to him, of course, that they could very well be the same four quarters he got last time he transacted with the tooth fairy. I dip shamefully into his "Disneyland" jar to reconcile these debts to tradition. My integrity would have me withdraw real money from my real bank account and deposit it with clinking finality into the jar Jonah so naively leaves on my dresser. This would do much to ameliorate my guilt whenever he declares his intent to save these new quarters in his "Disneyland" jar. Thus far those "new" quarters have all been "old" quarters already living in that jar, because I have NO quarters of my own. I have plastic that will, most assuredly, not be traded for a tooth.

I will count the remaining milk teeth and repair to the bank this week for a sufficient supply of dollar coins, and if we're going to concede interest, I might as well slip a twenty in the jar while I'm at it.

Behold the evolution of a six-year old mouth in just five days time.

"Snaggle Tooth"

"The Toothless Man"

Does "Whole Foods" Mean Eating the Stem?

2009-11-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

Cecily eats whole pears. She devours them from stem to stern, in great, greedy bites, leaving only the stickiness of her fingers as evidence of the edible encounter.
Who gave her that pear with a stem still attached? Who strapped her into her booster seat and slapped down uncut fruit on her tray? That pear might as well have a label fixed to the stem that says "My Mom can't be bothered with a knife," or "My Mom is too busy washing dishes," or "I am child number three."
We could call it lazy...but let's not. I do have my mental health to look after.

When Caroline was two our plum tree brought forth branches so heavy with fruit that a few of those branches couldn't hold their own. In the dark of night they buckled under the weight of luscious, ripe plums. This became Caroline's sustenance for the week that followed. Several times a day she would make her way out the back door to gather the harvest. She would squat and suck the nectar from as many of those little purple orbs as she wanted. I couldn't say for sure that she never swallowed a pit, but I can vouch for her having never choked on a pit.

This is the way to feed children...whole foods, in the purest sense. Yes, it comes of being busy, or being tired from being busy. It comes with the addition of more hungry mouths, but mostly more hungry whines and words.

Food....food....food....the whole consuming affair picks at my consciousness like the vexing drip, drip, drip of the Chinese water torture. Filling our vacuous bellies seems so...stone age, like we could have moved past this tedium around the same time penicillin moved us past the tedium of dying from a cut.
My Mother maintains that the day of "the pill" will come.
No, not that "pill". That one is old news.
She means the one that really liberates women. The pill we set down on the table with a glass of water in front of each famished member of the family that has gathered for a bounteous meal, and tell them to "dig in." Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub.

And I sometimes think I would buy that pill and dish it up guilt-free to my family three times a day...

Until I eat one of those pears that Cecily has been feasting on. Not the pear from the store, but the one off the tree in my back garden. I am a "God made the earth so it could bring forth perfect strawberries" kind of person. Although in late August we would just switch that strawberry bit out for "peaches." And then came the house with the pear tree. After five years of owning this house and this tree, I have finally figured out when to pick them. There is a thirty minute window between the time a single fruit reaches its full size and then begins to ripen. It is a different thirty minute window for every pear. This is too complicated for me, so I guesstimate and pick the tree clean in two harvests about a week apart. I empty my refrigerator of insipid things like milk or bread and fill it full of not-quite-ripe pears. These I remove four or five at a time to sit on the counter and ripen to...perfection? I marvel that I could think such a thing of a fruit that has so long been just bland, gritty flesh to me. But I tell you, every last fruit off this tree is perfection. It's like a new species. It is an ambrosia tree in my back garden.

I know food is heavenly beyond many things in this life. My pears keep me anchored to this reality. So I blame the absence of a dishwasher in my kitchen as the source of my food rancor. Well, no dishwasher and three kids. Ok, no dishwasher, three kids, and no one to cook or clean for me.
Oh no! That really is called lazy.
I need a new food paradigm. One that doesn't torture me.
It starts with feeling good about "whole foods" as distributed a la me. Giving a kid an apple doesn't dirty a dish, and it's good for my psyche.

Cecily may have swallowed a few pear seeds in her time (all fifteen months of it), but she is none the worse for wear. So far no pear trees are sprouting out her ears.

I'll keep cooking dinner (most of the time). But I am working on my gardening skills, and someday I will do as my husband's grandmother and announce to the family that "dinner is in the garden."

Curiosity With a Voice

2009-11-03T14:40:00.000-08:00

Caroline comes to the garden with me, a great festering mess of rotten tomatoes hanging from rotten vines that need throwing out before snow renders them immovable until spring. We work at unwinding the gratuitous lengths of wire I laced around my six-foot tomato cages and the rebar stake meant to anchor each cage to the center of the earth. She is surprisingly adept at this, her little fingers making quick work of the tangle that my bumbling, gloved fingers struggle with. Behind me she hums and talks aimlessly to herself until she realizes she's pretty good at what Mom is having a hard time with.

"Mom, did you ever know that you would have a four-year-old who is not so big, who is a helper and works hard like me?"

"No, I didn't know I would have a four-year-old like that."

She returns to her quiet work for a moment, then declares "I'm a Jesus girl."

__

We are in the van driving to meet Granny and Auntie Maren at the park for a fall picnic. Jonah and Caroline are in the back seat coexisting, for this brief moment, in peace. Caroline threatens the peace with an innocent question.
"Jonah, I think we're near the park. Do you want to take your jacket off before we get there?"
"Why?" he asks.
"So the people at the park won't see what you look like," she says with an implied 'of course'.
She asks this as if he wasn't wearing an ultra cool, height-of-kid-couture, GAP hoodie with an outline of Mt. Everest embroidered on the back. And he is wearing that hoodie!
"Like what?!" he demands to know.
"Well, your jacket has that funny thing on the hood that sticks out."
Silence.
He's mulling it over. Weighing the consequences of a six-year-old fashion faux pas at the park.
"No," he replies, completely unoffended. "I'll keep it on."
And we carry on, pax romana intact.

__

Caroline stands on the fourth stair. I don't know if this is fourth from the top or from the bottom, but I do know that the fourth stair is, for Jonah and Caroline, the pinnacle of stair-jumping bravado. It is Greg Louganis on the high dive, only we hope Caroline's jump has a more auspicious outcome than Greg's famous "whack."
Matt is Caroline's only audience. She readies herself while he watches intently, poised with saving arms should the fourth stair prove beyond her means. Caroline closes her eyes, puts a steady hand to her heart and pleads "Jesus, help my heart."
This must be the dramatic indicator that she is about to leap.
But no!
She has a thought, a question for which she requires an answer before her feet leave the fourth stair. Caroline opens her eyes and asks, "Dad, would it be bad to say 'Jesus, bless my little broken body'?"
I'm guessing Jesus has been asked to bless significantly less holy things than Caroline's little broken body.
But wait!
Such a question is more than alarming to the father waiting for the jump.
He might think to stop her at this point, the vision of her question being too much for his natural propensity to caution.
But Caroline is ready, her curiosity satiated, mind turned back to the inhuman feat ahead of her.
Before Matt can voice concern...
she bends her knees just a bit...
and flies...

Put "Triage" on my Tool Belt

2009-10-22T07:02:00.000-07:00

I could cradle her, but it's a gamble.

I could lay down next to her on her bed where she has been spending the last lone hour and ask "Did you do any laughing at pre-school today?" But she would likely say "No!" - with an implied post script of "get out of here and leave me alone" attached.

I might ask if she wants to read a book with me, help me put away toys, go for a walk.
*Snarl*Grimace*Snap

Caroline has a cup full of vitriol that she regularly splashes in my face. That cup runneth over and never seems to empty. I may think she has used it all up or slept it away, but she has hidden reserves.

Even now I bid her "Good morning" as she comes sleepily into the room, my arms out to pull her up on my lap.
Head down, she gives me a kind of "back off" grunt-whine and drop kicks her stuffed snowman at me.
Ahhh, a bright new day has dawned.

How do I make friends with a four-year-old-girl who just doesn't seem to like much of anything? Matt says she smiles for him. He says she is delightful and fun. Does he have a secret code word that liberates her inner angel? I am the Mom - I should have all the code words.

Here are the two abilities that comprise my mother-skills as developed with my first child:
Reading
Talking

That's it.

Jonah has never been too bothered that I have no imagination to make up games or stories, or magic spells to jolly him out of a scraped knee. If I should rest awhile from the banal duties of the house to spend time with a child, I will read to them. This I do with a complete lack of interest in or ability to make up games. Many thousands of people before me have published their magic words and pictures to be read to this very child of mine on this very couch with no effort at all from me. I spent all my effort long ago pushing the kid out of my body. Thereafter I take the easy road.

And talking. I can ask a hundred questions. I can respond to questions. This is actually a true skill. Matthew has helped me develop this over time. Matthew is better at it. But never mind.

So, there you go - reading and talking - my mothering prowess in all its grandeur.

Caroline laughs in the face of my mothering prowess. Well...really she whines, or growls, or screams in the face of my mothering prowess. Laughing would be altogether too jovial for her.

In light of this I am putting a new arrow in my quiver. I call it "Triage".

We have a dear old friend called Chuck. Once, Chuck came to our house delivering a box of food stuffs I had purchased through him. Considering Chuck is around 80 and recently had knee surgery I would normally have carried the box into the house myself. But I happened to be about nine months pregnant at the time and therefore helpless even in the eyes of the one-kneed-eighty-year-old. While coming in Chuck inevitably tripped and fell up three steps into our kitchen. He came away with a bloody shin, but alright overall.

Caroline was almost three at the time. And I'm sure she almost felt sorry for Chuck. But what she mostly felt was total fascination. "Was he bleeding, Mommy? Did he cry, Mommy? Can he still walk, Mommy?" In the first day of the accident I must have recounted the story of Chuck Falling on the Three Stairs at least two dozen times. Books? We don't need no stinking books. Chuck Falling on the Three Stairs became our bedtime story, our morning time story, our I'm bored story, our stop-the-fit-throwing story. Caroline is four and a half now and we still get serious mileage out of this story.

A month or two later another dear old friend had an accident. My sweet 86-year-old Reva decided she was going to walk to church on her own because her ride did not show up. She (purposefully I'm sure) forgot her cane. She always says she doesn't need "that silly old thing." A block away from her house she fell flat on her face. A neighbor called an ambulance, and despite our worst fears Reva came away with only two black eyes and a few sore spots.

Caroline could not get enough of it. We added Reva Fell on the Sidewalk to our repertoire of stories.

We now have a rather august collection of Triage stories.

Mom Split Her Chin Open at the Pool
Aubrey Slices Her Leg Open in the Garage
How Dad Got a Harry Potter Scar
The Horse Stepped on Mom's Foot or The Horse Stepped on Aubrey's Leg
Mom Burns Her Hands Cutting Chili Peppers
Nana Breaks Her Arm Falling off the Porch
Tickle Grandpa Nearly Cuts His Arm Off While Fishing
Granny Breaks Her Wrist Delivering Christmas Cookies

So long as people we know continue to hurt themselves I have found a way to get Caroline in my lap and....connect. I'm not sure yet what this reveals about Caroline. She is not laughing at people's pain. It's more like she is absorbed in the horror of it. She doesn't like her own blood, and she DOES NOT like stories about her own wounds. I suspect there is a little bit of entertainment in it. I can tell a pretty good story if it is true, I just can't make one up as I go. But I also suspect that knowing each of these stories ends with survival is a wee bit comforting for Caroline. She gets hurt A LOT. Knowing other people get hurt - with blood even- and move on to enjoy chocolate ice cream again is promising.

So, "Triage" because it's kind of like nurses getting together to have a "cold one" after work and swapping emergency room stories. And "Triage" because it is my own emergency room effort to create a relationship with Caroline.

Now the label on my mother-skills arsenal declares:
Reading
Talking
Triage

Who knows what Cecily might put in my box.

His Imaginary,Telepathic, Pen-Pal

2009-10-20T12:20:00.000-07:00

I miss Gavin-Height

He wasn't here for long and I would like to have known him better.

As a kid I had lots of friends; neighborhood friends, school friends, church friends...sibling friends -whose particular brand of friendship sometimes hovered dangerously close to fatal- but I do not remember ever having an imaginary friend.

When Jonah introduced us to Gavin-Height it was not the "Here is my new friend standing-beside-me-can't-you-see-him-Mom" variety of introduction. I really don't remember a specific declaration or "Nice to meet you" experience. Gavin-Height came slowly into existence. Like Pinocchio, he bandied about with a pseudo identity until one day - poof - he was a real boy, and we happily accepted him as such.

We never talked to Gavin-Height, only about him.
I never observed even Jonah talking to him.

How Jonah got his information I don't know. Jonah was four when this started. He would have understood validating the source of his knowledge about Gavin-Height with a claim such as "G-H sent me a letter, a postcard, an email, he called me, I saw him on the street..." But Jonah never revealed how he knew what he knew.

And this is what he knew:
Gavin-Height and Jonah were cousins
They were the same age
Gavin-Height had blue hair
Gavin-Height lived with his grandma
The grandma was not Jonah's grandma
Gavin-Height and his grandma traveled

Jonah and I went through a phase of reading about different countries. We built a repertoire of impressive facts we could cite about far off places that really existed. Someone might say "Wow, Jonah is so smart. I couldn't even tell you where Pakistan was on a map, much less what they like to eat."
But it's not about smart, is it? Jonah is curious. Jonah is willing to accept whatever attention his mother offers and if that comes in the form of reading a book about children in Sri Lanka he doesn't turn me away. Kids are pretty universally curious. Nothing is old hat. The world is new with every new mind that enters it. The complexities and beauties of life will settle upon them like raw wool with which their minds will spin radiant threads of knowledge. They will happily spill out all the silky ribbons of information flitting about in their heads to any willing audience. We adults might have turned off 'curious' or abandoned 'learn new things for the sake of it' in lieu of making dinner and earning a living. We forget that it is not "smart" to know that Pakistan is sandwiched between India and Afghanistan, it is "smart" to want to know.

I'm not sure that Gavin-Height was so much an imaginery friend as he was a kind of imaginary, telepathic pen-pal. He didn't eat dinner with us, he kept us abreast of his travels with grandma.

Jonah: "Mom, Gavin-Height is in China today."
Mom: "What's he doing there?"
Jonah: "He's going to school with Xui Li (pronounced shoe-lee)"
Mom: "What's his grandma doing while he's at school?"
Jonah: "She's fishing."

We met Xui Li and her parents in a book about life in China. In the book we went to school with her and saw pictures of many little Chinese children that all look very similar to our western eyes. Identical school uniforms did nothing to diminish the differentiation troubles we Occidentals have. We met Xui Li again through Gavin-Height and his wandering grandmother.

Over several months Gavin-Height carried us away to Israel, Paris, California, Iran, Maryland, Italy, and Idaho. His expeditions were both reactionary and innovative - his trail sometimes winding its way through books we had already traveled and sometimes breaking new ground requiring that we read to catch up with him.

One evening Jonah sat at the dining table coloring as I made a cake. I greased the two round cake pans then put flour in to coat the surface. Tapping it this way and that to ensure no spot was left uncovered. Jonah watched intently. I turned the pan over the sink and slapped the bottom a few times to get rid of the excess flour which came away in a white cloud sailing down to the drain.
"Do you know what that's called, Mom?"
"No, what?" I asked, not entirely sure what he was referring to.
"It's a 'Huff'.
"What is a 'huff' ? I wanted to make sure I understood.
"When the flower falls down like rain."
"Where did you learn that?"
"From Gavin-Height........he learned it from his grandma."

I think that was one of the last things we heard from Gavin-Height. Maybe he settled on a country he just couldn't bear to leave. Maybe he turned five and had to go to school. Maybe grandma ran out of money with which to bank roll the globe-trekking. Maybe Jonah didn't need him anymore. I think maybe I needed him to stay a while longer - I knewJonah just a bit more through him.

I like that he had blue hair. I wonder what they thought of that in Israel.

Peter Rabbit and Higher Education

2009-09-25T11:21:00.000-07:00

My institution of higher learning has two classrooms; my kitchen and my car. I imagine there are those erudite professors who might shake their head at the inadequacy of such an environment dedicated to my education. But this is where a mother spends most of her time, and this is where I have opportunity to listen to public radio. Granted, their are distractions; one six-years-old, one four, and one just over a year.

Surprisingly my children are very accepting of the constant flow of information that comes from the radio. On occasion-but not often-I will grant them an "Itsy Bitsy Spider", but their main auditory diet consists more of Steve Inskeep, Diane Rehm, and Neal Conan than the beloved little contrary Mary who grows a garden on cockle shells. Although we recently listened to an interview with an author that compiled a book of all the nursery rhymes he could discover. Mary was mentioned that day.

I began my University experience as an eighteen-year-old freshman at the University of Utah in 1994. I remember the thrill of a clean notebook and a new syllabus evolving into tattered pages filled with my quick scrawl about Dionysus' indulgence, or the rate of rotaion of the moon on its own axis combined with its rate of revolution around the Earth resulting in our only ever seeing one side of the satellite.

My notebook today is a Peter Rabbit shopping list with a magnet on the back that keeps it fixed to the refrigerator. My note taking is most often done while I am either cooking or washing dishes. Inevitably the picture of Peter is smeared with tomato sauce or oil, or wrinkled from the dishwater that drips from my gloves as I try to write the name of someone or some book before I forget. This is a snapshot of my notes as they stand today:

parsley

Ibu Patel

The Foreigner's Gift- Frada Jami

Erin McKean - Dictionary Evangelist

kalamata olives
curry powder
milk

American Theocracy - Ken Phillips

Last Child in the Woods - Richard Louv

It is a shopping list for my kitchen and my enlightenment. Sometimes when I am not in my kitchen I forage for scraps of paper on which to quickly record these bits of information that will turn into trips to the library, an internet search, or a conversation with my husband. Periodically I make a sweep of car, diaper bag, desktop, and any other liable, cluttered corner, to collect all the scraps and save each gem in a file on my computer. Otherwise what might have been instructive, or even revelatory becomes merely clutter and then just gone.

I am not done with universities. But until I return as a "mature" student, I'll keep the radio on and send my meager offering during the public radio fund drive. After all, it's the cheapest tuition I've yet paid.

Slow Like Mo-lasses

2009-09-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

Yeats has gone posing this fundamental question: "Perfection of the LIFE or of the WORK?"
(Question mark added)
My husband has gone borrowing the question- embedded in the text of an entire poem on this theme- and placing it in my bag where I will discover it in the first months of our marriage. I will be at work that morning while he is still in bed, yet to start his day at University. I will feel sick to my stomach because it is early, and I am allergic to early. I will loathe where I am because it is perfection of nothing. But there are dollars to be had at the end of the day, and we are in great need of dollars.

We are ten years on from my discovery of Yeats' poem in a frame in my bag. I kept it in view during every hour I ever worked for pay. I could rest my fingertips on the keyboard at my desk, close my eyes and see the words speaking to me, insisting that the choice is living, it demands deliberateness.

THE CHOICE
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it takes the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.
W.B. Yeats

Well, I am no fan of remorse. Neither was Yeats, and he published his own choice through the image of a good many of his poems. Here is the one that paints my picture-my choice.

LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and waddles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
W.B. Yeats

So.....obviously the new fundamental question becomes - what is the address of the "bee-loud glade"?
I am confident I am not allergic to early in this place.

Is Yeats testing me? Is my husband testing me? I could sell all and seek the "purple glow" in a little corner of Ireland. But surely, perfection of the life can be had in my back yard. I don't have a cabin-I have a home of bricks and mortar made. I don't have nine bean rows-I have five. I don't live alone-I live with love, from husband and three children.

THREE CHILDREN!

This is not the beginning of a poem. This is my admission to family, the world, and these witnesses, that my peace does, indeed, come dropping slow. Slow like mo-lasses. Slow like a big old oak tree. Slow like a three-year-old putting their shoes on. My peace comes dropping so slow that the last detectable drop was in 2003 before that first child came to my Innisfree.
Yeats had peace, I have children. Would I trade? No. He paints a pretty picture, but it's a bit of a lonely pretty picture.

Mine may be a children-loud glade, but my glade is good...it is perfection-of-the-life-good.